Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture

This page intentionally left blank R e a di ng t h e Ru i ns From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist ap...

Author: Leo Mellor

230 downloads 2086 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

This page intentionally left blank

R e a di ng t h e Ru i ns

From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitionsÂ€– the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to World War II, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writersÂ€ – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose MacaulayÂ€ – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short storiesÂ€– as well as film and visual art. l e o m e l l or is the Roma Gill Fellow in English and a Newton Trust Lecturer at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

R e a di ng t h e Ru i ns Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture L eo M e ll or

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107009295 © Leo Mellor 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Mellor, Leo, 1977– Reading the ruins: modernism, bombsites and British culture / Leo Mellor. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00929-5 (hardback) 1.â•‡English literature – 20th century – History and criticism.â•… 2.â•‡ World War, 1939–1945 – Great Britain – Literature and the war.â•… 3.â•‡ Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain.â•… 4.â•‡ World War, 1939–1945 – Social aspects – Great Britain.â•… 5.â•‡Great Britain – Civilization – 20th century.â•…I.â•‡Title. pr888.w66m45â•… 2011 820.990091–dc23â•…â•…â•… 2011020620 isbn 978-1-107-00929-5 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for my parents

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

page viii ix

Introduction

1

1 Imagining destruction

11

2 A metropolis aflame

47

3 Surrealism and the bombsites

85

4 The haunted city

138

5 The new London jungle

166

Coda

203

Notes Bibliography Index

205 230 242

vii

Illustrations

1 ‘If you tolerate this’. Poster, 1936–9 page 25 2 Graham Sutherland, cover for David Gascoyne’s Poems. (© Estate of Graham Sutherland) 95 3 Graham Sutherland, Devastation 1941: City, Twisted Girders. (© Estate of Graham Sutherland) 119 4 Graham Sutherland, Devastation 1941: City, Ruined Machinery in a Mantle Factory. (© Estate of Graham Sutherland) 120 5 Lee Miller, ‘1 Nonconformist Chapel + 1 bomb’, 1941. (© Lee Miller Archives, England, 2010; all rights reserved) 125 6 Lee Miller, ‘Blast pays tribute’, 1941. (© Lee Miller Archives, England, 2010; all rights reserved) 127 7 Lee Miller, ‘Women with fire masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941’. (© Lee Miller Archives, England, 2010; all rights reserved) 129 8 Destroyed building around St Paul’s, 1945, from The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps. (© London Metropolitan Archives) 175 9 Specimens of rosebay willowherb in the Natural History Museum. (© Natural History Museum, London) 181

viii

Acknowledgements

Parts of several chapters have appeared, in their earlier forms, as ‘Words from the Bombsites: Debris, Modernism and Literary Salvage’, in Critical Quarterly, 46:4, and as ‘War Journalism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Second World War Literature (2009). Other parts have been given as conference or symposia papers at the University of Cambridge, the Museum of Garden History, the University of Leeds and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. I would like to thank the following for their advice, conversations and critiques over the long gestation of this book: Jenny Chamarette, Charlotte Charteris, the late Andrew Crozier, the late Roger Deakin, Daisy Hay, Michael Hurley, Nancy Hirst, James Kennaway, Jane Lewty, Anne Lonsdale, Raphael Lyne, Richard Mabey, Marina MacKay, Joe Moshenska, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Adam Piette, James Purdon, Mark Rawlinson, Sophie Read, Glyn Salton-Cox, David Trotter, Geoff Ward, Christopher Woodward and Patrick Wright. I would especially like to express deep gratitude to Neil Jones, Sean McEvoy, Robert Macfarlane, Elizabeth Lloyd, David Alan Mellor, Rod Mengham and Ian Patterson, who all read and commented on substantial parts of the manuscript. My formative intellectual debts are to Diana Westlake, Judith Finn, Phillipa Berry, Peter de Bolla, Maud Ellmann, Nicky Zeeman and Laura Marcus. I also in turn now owe much to the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, the Newton Trust, and Murray Edwards CollegeÂ€– as well as to my undergraduate and graduate students over the past five years. The anonymous manuscript readers at Cambridge University Press were superbly helpful; Ray Ryan took on this project for the durationÂ€– and he has proved to be the epitome of an intellectually astute editor; Maartje Schletens and Gillian Dadd have attentively shepherded and cajoled the manuscript to this stage. Diolch yn fawr i bawb. And to Zoë Svendsen I owe more than I can write. ix

Introduction

[A]nd there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the Â�bombardment. A flapping gutter, glassless windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a tabletop. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb blasts: the children played about the steep slope of rubble; a piece of fire-place showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (1938) 1

In Greene’s description of a Brighton slum clearance scheme his central phraseÂ€ –‘as if’Â€ – is doing some stern and strenuous work. The preceding sentence has described a scene that could have been placed in any bombed city of the Spanish Civil War or drawn from the Japanese attacks on China, both conflicts underway when the novel was written, in 1937–8. If his disingenuous use of ‘bombardment’ as a way of describing a gale prepares expectaÂ�tions, then the template of the bombed metropolis as applicable to Britain is realised, partly as a form of foreboding and partly as an index of the details of destruction. All the items, disjunctions and classic tropes of the bombsite from that wartime literature to come are already present: household objects exposed violently to the world, disordered and incomplete remains, the absent glass as indicative of recent blast. Yet this is a scene of peacetime, the construction of a municipal utopia that will replace the actuality of squalor in the ironic Paradise Row. The real British bombsites, and Greene’s response to them, would follow only a few years later. This book tracks how British culture feared, predicted, engaged with, portrayed and interpreted the bombsites of the Second World War; those spaces of destruction in the midst of British towns and cities caused by enemy attacks. Both the national psyche and the architecture of cities today still bear the marks of the Blitz of 1940/1, the ‘little Blitz’ of 1943/4 and the V1 rocket and V2 missile attacks. Over 50 per cent of buildings 1

2

Reading the Ruins

within greater London were damaged, with the totals in some boroughs being far higher.2 The book’s argument stems from a belief that such material conditions provide the subject of many works, whether overtly or implicitly. It also argues for the significance of the more abstracted value of these spaces (whether theological, metaphorical, allegorical) for the narratives and iconographies of British culture, both then and now. For while every bombsite could be a useful metaphor and also a unique ruin, en masse they were to become an unavoidable fact on the ground, and a manifestation of how modern warfare literalised the phrase ‘Home Front’ with violence. As time passed they could be aestheticised into picturesque ruins or politicised through surrealism, observed through the templates of archaeology or natural history or the phantasmagoricÂ€– or merely played on by children. To study and write of Britain’s bombsites, making claims for them as worthy of detailed attention, is thus to be aware of the shifting paradigms of what historyÂ€– and literary history and cultureÂ€– chooses to unearth or to forget about the materiality of cities. Setting this book in its own place are some useful co-ordinates concerning the recent history of various critical approaches. Various distinct strands within contemporary criticism have grown over the past ten years that make such a study timely and necessary. The literature of the Second World War, for so long overshadowed by that from the First World (or Great) War in both popular and academic discourse, has undergone a sustained critical Â�re-evaluation. There is an increasing awareness of pluralities within the term ‘war writing’ and an acknowledgement that widespread civilian casualties and compositions meant previous soldier-poet paradigms would have to be revised. The poet Stephen Spender, writing in 1943, offered a reason why these zones of destruction might be so culturally resonant. He noted: ‘in this war, by “War Pictures” we mean, pre-eminently, paintings of the Blitz. In the last war we would have meant pictures of the Western Front … The background to this war, corresponding to the Western Front in the last war, is the bombed city’.3 But the bombsites bring war literally home to British terrain, in a way the Flanders trenches never could, and assert the mundane, complex and flammable actuality of the British city. An understanding of the fate of modernism, and indeed the deeper contours of British postwar culture and its literary validation, has then to acknowledge a material basis to disorder and the possibilities for narratives of reclaiming, rebuilding and remaking. But such an understanding also has to account for the survival of writersÂ€– and artistsÂ€– who chose to venerate the partial and incomplete, the broken or estranged. These men and women had been personally exposed to destruction, since the

Introduction

3

inescapability of the London bombsitesÂ€– both from sight and from consciousnessÂ€– was a postwar fact. But, rather more interestingly, they were familiar with broken cityscapes through a reliance on a created literary tradition: those inviting texts already existing that depicted a rewilded metropolis, or one filled with the debris of surrealism. This book will therefore allow the centrality of modernism to wartime culture also to reveal how much of postwar culture relied upon such an inheritance – for definition, even when overtly in reaction or opposition to fragments, debris and the charms of the ruin. Conceptualising any aesthetic in terms of locale can be useful, since it gives texture to particularity, specificity and the happenstance juxtapositions of geography that could remain obscured. There has recently been the growth of synoptic area studies, and these trace the relationship between literature and the urban experience: with the city as character or at least shaper of a particular consciousness and the possibility of knowledge. These have ranged from the best-selling and popular to the more specialised and theoretically informed.4 A topographic way of mapping narrative and form should have to acknowledge the cataclysm that altered the physical space of London more than any event since the Great Fire of 1666. Against an interest in the city as a metropolis that shapes culture and consciousness there has also been an ever-present interest in the ruin and the fragment, the incomplete or decayed structure that offers an implicit dialogue with the past through its very continued existence. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century British criticsÂ€ – from Rose Macaulay to Christopher WoodwardÂ€– have attempted to explore a particularly British belief in the ruin.5 For the continuing significance of the ruin in a wider European tradition, as both a point of pondering and a jagged material fact, must include figures as disparate as Freud and Hegel, Spengler and Mary Shelley, Piranesi and Anselm Kiefer. Moreover, recent academic work has used not only the ruin, but also the ‘ruin-gazer’ and the ‘ruin-theorist’, to offer nuanced critiques of twentieth-century modernity; tracking back from the debris of the World Trade Center to consider, as ‘master tropes of traumatic modernity’, how structures incomplete, broken, smashed or decayed could tell far more than they ever could while whole.6 A corollary to this is the continuing growth of an apocalyptic aesthetic in popular culture, one where, under the pressures of anthropogenic climate change and demographic angst, the ruined cityscape again becomes the iconography of choice for film-makers and novelists to have their Â�characters traverse.7

4

Reading the Ruins

But it is the renewed and complicating study of modernism, with its ability to assign signification to the fragmentation of form and content, that has provided the intellectual motor for the research from which this study has emerged. Several works published over the last five years have attended to the problems in delimiting or understanding how modernism maturedÂ€– and dissipatedÂ€– within British culture. Two main aspects to this revisionism have given the precise conditions from which my work emerges. Firstly, questions of the pluralities and the variegated textures of works, inherent when considering aesthetic form and a historical epoch, mean that such telling titles as Modernisms have had particular influence.8 The amplitude and multifarious nature of the aesthetic in the period, and its subsequent reduction to cliques and canons, especially through a settlement with the growth of English as an academic subject, can be understood rather better from the vantage point of the present day. Secondly, there has been the wider critical interest in marking whereÂ€– and howÂ€– modernism ends.9 Many works that have considered this issue have a variety of structures, but all need at least to engage with the question of ‘late modernism’ or the various possible points of epoch shift. The Second World War has remained a persuasive end point, both as part of a preparatory shift to a democratisation of literature and to a national culture ‘becoming minor’.10 Moreover, any study of literature’s relation to the bombsites has to exist within a framework of war culture and how the study of that culture has changed. In readings of the British Second World War literature, the centrality of the work of Mark Rawlinson and Adam Piette is unarguable;11 of note now would be hints of a formalist turn from those such as Kate McLoughlin.12 One way of attempting to remove the literature of the Second World War from merely existing within pre-existing ‘war literature’ terms has been the move fully to conceptualise the 1940s as a decade, one that links both the writers and ideological interests of the 1930s and the 1950s. Such an approach can be seen in work such as Marina MacKay’s with the term ‘Mid-Century’,13 orÂ€ – less successfullyÂ€ – the ideological claims made for ‘intermodernism’ as an idiom that could colÂ� onise the debateable lands, and genres, of these years.14 But while current efforts at a reappraisal of British literature from the 1930s to 1950s in terms of influences, continuities and linkages is worthwhile, it can obscure a problem. Such connective continuities undermine the neat delineation of literary eras into numerically tidy decades, or ring-fenced pre-war and postwar epochs; but they also require modernism to exist as a dissipating, ebbing, andÂ€– ultimatelyÂ€– reactionary ideology.

Introduction

5

However, as this book will show, British writingÂ€ – and culture in Â� generalÂ€– of the wartime years was dependent in various ways on the aesthetic and intellectual possibilities offered by modernism.15 There is also one fundamental reason for the centrality of modernism as an active form; for modernism appeared to have been utterly and hauntingly proleptic. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s British writing was filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared in novels, plays and poems as content: with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also in the mise en page shapes of broken poetics and recovered objet trouvés phrase shards. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a template. During that conflict many writers attempted to engage with the devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war: but they did so with avant la lettre implications of the prewar culture. This did not just apply to those writers whose own interwar works relied on shards and residues. An awareness of the sense of prophecy coming to pass is acutely expressed in ‘Notes on the Way’, an essay of Greene’s for Time and Tide in the autumn of 1940. His comments on bombed London, and the sensations it exposes alongside the burst-Â�open buildings, move into a wider political point: Violence comes to us more easilyÂ€ – not only by the political sense but by the moral sense. The world we lived in could not have ended any other way. The curious waste lands one sometimes saw from trainsÂ€– the cratered ground round Wolverhampton under a cindery sky with a few cottages grouped like stones among the rubbish: those acres of abandoned cars round Slough: the dingy fortune-teller’s on the first-floor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back street; they all demanded violence, like the rooms in a dream where one knows that something will presently happenÂ€– a door fly open or a window catch give and let the end in.16

Greene’s ‘waste lands’ are actual here, but for many others who drew on Eliot’s text as template for a response to violence, the linkage was made textually absolute and unambiguous, as for example in Rose Macaulay’s stories set against her own, bomb-blasted ruins. A critique of such recapitulatory approaches, ones that overtly utilised the proleptic effects of modernism, does however need to acknowledge a singular fact on the ground in London: the ruined city was not only material for writers, but also the background and inescapable condition of possibility for late modernism itself. But why did bombsites offer so much material to so many writers? The obvious discordant pleasures of buildings turned inside out and of the sublime inherent in visions of destruction point to materiality as the key site of

6

Reading the Ruins

attraction. Yet many kinds of time itself were also presently exposedÂ€– and became resonant for writers. For bombsites contain absolute doubleness. They are inherently both a frozen moment of destruction made permanent; as much as they capture the absolute singular moment, the repeated cliché of the stopped clock exposed, battered by blast but still affixed to a wall in a bombsite: yet they also act as a way of understanding a great swathe of linear time previously hidden or buried, offering history exposed to the air. Such temporal expansiveness is more amorphous than might be initially realised, stretching back through an archaeology usefully uncovered by bombing. The late 1940s were vintage years for being able to perceive London’s previously hidden layers.17 Additionally, the bathos of intimate life was blasted openÂ€ – an aspect Louis MacNeice captured in 1941 when he saw that ‘sometimes, when a house has been cut in half, you get the pleasant effect of a doll’s houseÂ€– a bath in the bathroom and a dresser in the kitchen and wallpaper with roses’.18 Directly implied alongside these versions of the past comes the postwar afterlife of the bombsites amid a very different cityÂ€– the future of ruins. But trying to write about the process of destruction, or the split-second action of fire or explosions, was difficult, and it strained the available language. In a war report on the V1 rockets, ‘London fights the robots’, Ernest Hemingway interviewed some fighter pilots, who attempted tenatively to find a new language, one applicable for the sudden moments of explosive violence that ensued after shooting down these weapons: ‘â†œ“It is a sort of air bubble that rises from them”, he said. “Bubble” had been quite a venturesome word to use, and he took confidence from it and tried a further word. “It is rather like a huge blossoming of air rising.”â†œ’19 There will, inevitably, be limits, exclusions and points of unequal focus in this book. It is a study of a particularly British cultural response, and most of my detailed readings concern LondonÂ€– with only very brief comparative excursions. Potential further comparisons and contrasts abound. Firstly, European experiences of the Second World War could be consideredÂ€– whether in national literatures or debates, for example with regards to the continued politico-ethical maelstrom around Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire) (2002). Then there are the British experiences of the results of ‘Bomber’ Harris’ policies as Germany ‘reaped the whirlwind’ of the Allied bomber offensive, experiences which were Â�figured in works such as Stephen Spender’s European Witness (1946). There are distinct parallels between the pleasure taken by various critics in the ‘vista’ of ruined London and Albert Speer’s imagined future teleology for the ruins of ‘Germania’ (the renamed Berlin) that would obey a ‘Theorie vom

Introduction

7

Ruinwert’. These structures would continue to impress and terrify even after they had fallen into stone (not steel or ferro-concrete) fragments. As Speer wrote in his memoirs: ‘Our building must speak to the conscience of future generations of Germans. With this kind of argument Hitler also understood the value of a durable kind of construction.’20 The possibility of an avowed and pertinently theoretical perspective on the writing of this period is obvious, and it has been performed with elanÂ€– for example by the psychoanalytic critique of Lyndsey StonebridgeÂ€– or with the overtly anti-heroic democratising of Paul Fussell.21 But my methodological aims and co-ordinates are simple: the mode is close reading coupled with historical formalism. My desire is to understand how forms might be historically contingent and yet remain open to the complexity of their subject matter. Thus the aspects of uncomfortable plurality in the form of the works, the constructions of difficulty (consciously or not) in matters of representation, and the strange complexity of works that haveÂ€– subsequentlyÂ€– failed any test of canonicity, are all of inherent interest to my study. The impossibility of totalising coverage means that there are both limits and lacunae, and a writer’s oeuvre may be understood from representativeÂ€ – or, more interestingly, non-representativeÂ€ – individual works. Moreover, while the main field this book works within is the sphere of the literary, there are also various comparisons and excursions, mainly into visual culture, including sketches, photography and film. At points I also consider music and anthropology. The literary works included range between the canonical and the forgotten, and cover much that could be dismissed as pulp or inconsequential. But for understanding the terrain of the bombsites in the present day, and comprehending how it was understood at the time, they are all vital. The chapters of the book progress on a roughly chronological path from the First World War, with each taking a central conceit or idea as a way of gaining purchase on the rubble and its interpreters. Chapter 1 will focus on pre-war fears and visions. The years before 1939 in Britain were decades haunted by portents of war. In the shorthand of populist iconography, as well as in many literary works, this was expressed through the image of the bombed city. Poetry and prose that engaged with the wars in Abyssinia, China and Spain returned again and again to observation-as-premonition. Central to my argument will be various complex exculpations and pieces of positioning: from Virginia Woolf, Louis MacNeice and Henry Green. Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941)Â€ – set in 1939Â€ – and George Orwell’s Coming up for Air (1939) rely upon very different devices for making the imaginative leap to see city streets filled with rubble and buildings

8

Reading the Ruins

blown apart. Yet they all do so, and thereby externalise political dread, fitting the ennui and cognitive dissonance of the characters on to an Â�‘inescapable’ future. Chapter 2 will chart responses to the events that created the city bombsitesÂ€– the air raids and incendiary bombs of the Blitz in 1940/41. It will also bring together much fugitive and disparate work on the effect of fire in literature: it will thus offer a reading of an elemental force, but also bring in the particularities and peculiarities of such a conflagration. A complex dynamic that lurks in many of the works, the concept of a purgative flame as well as the desire to end a corrupted interwar era, is typified in the acknowledgement MacNeice accords to ‘Brother Fire’Â€– seeing him as ‘O enemy and image of ourselves’. In the short stories of William Sansom, such a desire for destruction mutates into disorientation in the laconic intensity of ‘Fireman Flower’, ‘The Wall’ and ‘Building Alive’. Likewise, Henry Green served in the wartime Auxiliary Fire Service and his short stories, as well as his novel Caught (1943), develop a rather different narrative complicity with this most transformative element. Perhaps the apotheosis of flame enchantment comes in Four Quartets and, especially, in ‘Little Gidding’. The one-time fire-warden T. S. Eliot gives wartime flames both a role as a transformative and culture-terminating force, but this has to be set against the symbolic unity they can also encode: ‘And the fire and the rose are one’. A bus flung upside-down into a tree; tombs blown open; a cascade of rubble through the surviving doorway of a chapel; the smell of coffee as an entire warehouse of it burned: in Chapter 3 the impact of surrealism will be assessed. For it is unsurprising that both reportage and more considered writing from blitzed London returned repeatedly to versions of Surrealism as an explanatory mode. Yet histories of surrealism in Britain do not dwell on the years of the Second World War, identifying it rather as an epoch of decline. I wish to challenge such a view, arguing that the cityscapes of 1939–45 were zones of unrivalled inspiration, giving rise to works that let us understand Surrealism in Britain in a rather different way: as a source, not a doctrine; as a template, not a movement. Thus in this chapter I will consider what the surrealist fragment meant in the works of some key writers, artists and film-makers. I will also consider how the idea of the fragment was changed, not only by the bombed, fragmentfilled cityscapes, but also by the lives and consciousnesses fragmented in wartime conditions. Central to this argument will be case studies, including discussion of the films and writings of Humphrey Jennings, the photography of Lee Miller, and the poetry of David Gascoyne. In addition

Introduction

9

I will consider various related aspects, such as the relatively forgotten New Apocalyptic Movement, led by Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. In his autobiography the fighter pilot Richard Hillary, scarred and burnt, titles one of his chapters: ‘Shall I live for a ghost?’22 The haunted or ghostly cityscapes of the phantasmagoric city of rubble will be addressed in Chapter 4. This will include meditations on who or what might haunt them, whether recent or historical ghosts, not excluding the spirit of the buildings that now lay in heaps of rubble. Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Afterword’ to her Second World War collection of short stories, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), expressly understands the phantasmagoric city of ruins as a way of mapping mental states. In ‘Mysterious Kôr’ (1944), London is evacuated of the living and becomes ‘like the moon’s capitalÂ€– shallow, cratered, extinct’. Texts can themselves conjure up ghosts. The recent publication of David Jones’ previously lost Wedding Poems allows a comparison to The Anathemata (1952) and provokes questions about how, for Jones, one war haunts the next. Moreover, life-shattering bombed buildings, ghosts and traces become a form of narrative in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943). A taxonomic exploration of the new London jungle of bombsite greenery will comprise Chapter 5. A few days before VE day, in 1945, the Times published a long leader column that began with a list: ‘Wildflowers had spread over the bombsites: rose-bay willowherb, coltsfoot, groundsel, Oxford ragwort, Canadian fleabane and Thanet cress’. The combination of specificity, national identity, recuperative pastorality and the endurance of ruined ground are packed into an inventory of flowers. One of the most remarked-on features of the bombsites in London was their new verdancy. This chapter will address the resonances these new wild spaces had for writers, as the centre of cities became cloaked in brambles, buddleia, ivy andÂ€– most importantlyÂ€– rosebay willowherb. With its pink flowers and jagged leaves, this plant had been pressed into literature before, as merely another species growing beside the track in Edward Thomas’ poem ‘Adlestrop’. But now it became the emblematic flower of the bombsites. There are, however, salutary limits to engagements with such ruins. In April 1945, in an office in New York, an Americanised W. H. Auden was recruitedÂ€ – for his German-speaking abilities and his familiarity with pre-war GermanyÂ€ – into the morale division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Passing through London in May, bedecked in an American uniform and with his usual hubrisÂ€– ‘My dear, I’m the first major poet to fly the Atlantic’23Â€ – he then travelled via sea and road to Darmstadt near Frankfurt, where, in his words, ‘there was once a town’.24

10

Reading the Ruins

It had been the subject of a mass daylight raid in September 1944, which had transformed the centre into ruins. Faced with an expanse of bombsites that mixed remaining walls with piles of ash and charred timber, Auden saw a landscape so terrible as to be beyond critical or Â�creative response, as he later recalled: ‘We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went in to a city in ruins and asked them if it had been hit. We got no answers that we didn’t expect.’25 He left quickly afterwards and never wrote about it. Yet this blank nullity, when faced with destruction, was unusualÂ€– and probably shaped by Auden’s status as ambivalent external observer. For British bombsites, while also places of debris and deathÂ€– with the ruined city personified as ‘O Mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain’ in Mervyn Peake’s meditation ‘London, 1941’Â€– were incredibly resonant for the artistic and literary imagination.26 This book attempts to understand and explain why culture was, is, and will continue to be haunted by these zones.

Ch apter 1

Imagining destruction

We realised that London was suffering a terrible visitation from above.

William le Queux, The Terror of the Air (1920)1

I told you so. You damned foolsÂ€–

H. G. Wells, preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air (1908)2

Within the longer history of imagining the ruination of the city, both as a pleasure and a terror, stretching back through Troy, Alexandria and Rome, British late Victorian literature was highly detailed and specific. Its combinations of war fear and war lust drew heavily on conceptions of death from above, combining metaphors for heavenly vengeance with the model of totalising omnipotence offered by the Royal Navy. Even before credible aircraft flew, works such as William D. Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1881) feature the unleashing of ‘a rain of awful death to every breathing thing’ from aeroplanes to ‘subjugate the inferior races’; while in Samuel Odell’s The Last War, or the Triumph of the English Tongue (1898) thousands of airships, laden with bombs and a form of ur-Napalm, wipe out French and German cities.3 Tom Harrison, many years later, commented astutely on the hyper-inflation of possible destruction in such works: ‘Air-power was born with a kind of huge attachment, a Siamese twin, so that the facts of the matter were intimately blended with an almost separate, quite identifiable other form called Fear-Fantasy.’4 The British War Office publication, issued in 1905, The Manual of Military Ballooning conflated a directly plausible military use of balloons for observation and reconnaissance with the future possibility that dropping gun cotton charges might have a ‘moral[e] effect’ on the enemy.5 But any conflict of manoeuvre was assumed to be land- or sea-based: the possibilities of aerial attack were limited by miniscule payloads and the vagaries of the weather. The imaginative potential of war being extended into another dimension 11

12

Reading the Ruins

did, however, start to make an appearance, and especially so in a medium itself as new as flightÂ€– film. The peril from above had to be anchored down by narrative decenciesÂ€– through, for example, a compliant heroine and proto-boffin embracing at the close of The Battle of the Clouds (1909).6 Yet these generic elements appear oddly sinister as its depictions of a city engulfed in voracious flames is only partially offset by the subplot hinted at in its subtitle: A Love Story of the Inventor of the Aerial Torpedo. Contemporary to this is The War in the Air (1908), H. G. Wells’ attempt to extrapolate technological prowess and insert picaresque tangents in his imagined world war fought from airships. In it the cities are vulnerable and without defenceÂ€– and it is the Germans that, plausibly, have the upper hand. In Wells’ workÂ€– a ‘fantasia of possibility’Â€– the ‘moral effect’, explained in the Military Ballooning Manual and determined by the War Office at great length, is seen in the movements of masses and totalising destruction. 1 November 1911: the first true air raid from an aircraftÂ€– and from it the first bombsite, about as minimal as imaginable: a few broken buildings and tents at an oasis outside Tripoli.7 The two bombs dropped by a small and flimsy biplane piloted by Giulio Cavotti were part of an attempt to suppress an uprising against Italian colonial rule. Yet such attacks, which were taken up with alacrityÂ€– and swiftly and euphemistically cloaked as ‘air policing’Â€– by all the colonial powers,8 offer in their exploding wake an enticing starting point to consider how the vulnerability of a cityÂ€– and its inhabitantsÂ€ – could be considered. For out in the various empiresÂ€ – British, French and ItalianÂ€– the light bomber became quickly accepted, offering more precise coercion than the inefficient guns of, for example, the cruiser riding off West Africa, which seemed to be just, in Joseph Conrad’s phrase, ‘firing into an entire continent’.9 Far away from the fictional hyperbole of imaginatively shattered London, devastated villages in Burma, the North-West Frontier, French Morocco and Iraq proved the bombsite as an efficient marker for inducing compliance with colonial ruleÂ€– but lacking any writers, whose work has survived, to lament this. A division was to emerge between the ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ areas of the world that would bedevil attempts to limit the role of the bomberÂ€– and rationalise the vulnerability of citiesÂ€– in the years that followed.10 Thus the British bombsiteÂ€– as imagined in the years before the Second World WarÂ€– was a complex place. In works of fiction, and of war planning, it was delineated as a spatial and cultural phenomenon with extraordinary symbolic significance, and a zone from which forces would emerge to destroy societyÂ€ – but a space also ripe for hope of redemption and rebuilding. The origins of the bombsite as an ideaÂ€– in the intersections


13

of bombers, of air power in general, of British society, cityscapes and the possibilities of the traumatised psycheÂ€– is also not straightforward. For the concept of capricious and destructive power from the air did not only offer a template for eradicating cities, and of sending their populations mad; it also allowed the imagination to edit scenery with imagined omnipotence. An example would be Clough Williams-Ellis’ desire to preempt Betjeman by calling in an aesthetic air strike on interwar sprawl: It is also to be hoped that some regard may be paid to pre-existing land-lubber amenities in the actual placing of aerodromes, and that the Stonehenge scandal will not be repeated. There, with all Salisbury Plain to choose from, the R.F.C. (as it then was) elected to plump down its hangars and all their sprawling appurtenances within a few hundred yards of what should be the most hallowed stones in England. Never were venerable remains less venerated, for at this very moment of writing, our late enemies having declined our military invitation to obliterate the circle with their bombs, an offensive pink bungalow is being completed hard by that, with the outrageous café adjoining, makes one almost pray for a destructive air raid. As it now is, Stonehenge is intolerable, and by no means to be visited save by blind archaeologists. Hemmed in by iron railings, guarded by a turnstile and a post-card kiosk, glowered at by the derelict aerodrome and smirked at by café and bungalow, this sacred place is indeed painful beyond bearing. If it were an even chance that a hostile air raid would destroy the circle or, alternatively, obliterate the parasitic growths about it, there are probably those who would favour the place being well and truly bombed.11

This chapter will avoid this wished-for imposition of a bombsite over Stonehenge, but will now, rather, navigate chronologically through some distinct but interrelated types of imagined destructionÂ€– and the sources for such imaginings. Firstly, the nascent possibilities of imagined threats from the air will be set against the actuality of the First World WarÂ€ – and against Virginia Woolf’s mode of representing the impact on the psyche of this sphere of action. Then I will track the extrapolations from First World War destruction found in British interwar popular fiction, and how these texts developed and inflated fears in a symbiotic relationship with military planners. Responses to plausible threats from aircraft in the 1930s were framed by many writers in the lessons of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), attempting to read Spanish bomb damage and bomb victims as warnings to London and Londoners. Poets such as Randall Swingler and George Barker questioned the use of the bombsite as a lesson, but held this in tension with mourning and the aestheticisation of suffering. Finally, the literature composed in, or depicting, 1939 itself will be considered. For on the brink of the outbreak of war a number of writers

14

Reading the Ruins

who form no unified groupÂ€ – Patrick Hamilton, George Orwell, Louis MacNeice, Henry Green and, again, Virginia WoolfÂ€– all experimented with different forms of representability to capture the outlines of aerialborne dread and threat, of self-delusion and of stoicism. Such attempts stretched the inadequacy of description and the conflicting political resÂ� onances of language against the expected horror. Analysing such polyvalent meanings that were both imposed upon, and radiated from, the imagined and actual bombsites brings the need to constellate multiple discourses: military history alongside alarmist fiction; and detailed war reports alongside shadowy projected fears. But it is how Â�wriÂ�ters transformed the fears that provides the heart of this chapter. From the first German airship raids on London in 1915 onwards there are distinct and different stages in the realisation that the city was vulnerable to attacks from the air. These forms of realisation arrive through acts of representation and of warning, only ending in the actual devastation of 1940/1. Be au t i f u l b om b -l a de n Z e ppe l i ns The First World War, and especially the Zeppelin raids on both Britain and France from 1915 onwards, started to alter the pre-war assumptions of the unrecordability of bomb damage and destruction, and the position of the bomb victim as merely a colonial subject. Although the total damage was slight, and total deathsÂ€– 1,413Â€– tiny compared to the Western Front, the attacks on London had a huge effect in terrifying both the general population, for whom air attack represented a paradigm shift in the front line, and writers, who now could see the British city as filled with actualÂ€– not merely potentialÂ€– bombsites. Airship losses persuaded the Germans to build heavier multi-engine aircraft such as the Gotha and the Staaken, and Britain replied with a grander plan, which heralded the beginning of strategic bombing: ‘[t]he day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operation of war’.12 Yet the cultural responses are typified by a doubleness; the intertwined aspects of threat and spectacle, fascination and dread. This is glimpsed in a panÂ� oply of writers, but two who could seemingly not be more radically divergent can start to represent them: Katherine Mansfield and John Buchan. Awe and fear co-mingle and become visible in a letter of Mansfield; as she found the Zeppelin passing over Paris to be ‘the Ultimate Fish … passed by flying high, with fins of silky grey. It is absurd to say romance is dead when things like this happen & the noise it madeÂ€– almost soothing you


15

knowÂ€– steadyÂ€– and clear doo-da-doo-daÂ€ – like a horn. I longed to go and follow it.’13 While in Buchan’s Mr Standfast (1919) the crowd who had begun to shelter in the tube station are ‘torn between fear of their lives and interest in the spectacle’.14 Yet such a ‘spectacle’ was radically disrupting the diurnal rhythms of the city life cycle, and the growing nature of the threatÂ€– as the Germans attacked in incrementally heavier waves and with newer weapons15Â€– meant that many literary works concentrated on how life could be lived amid the new ruins and blackouts. In Zeppelin Nights (1917), by Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Hueffer, Boccacio’s Decameron is updated and transposed to a London cellar. Then, as Ian Patterson analyses it, ‘they dispel their fear of the raids by telling stories, which themselves gradually provide a moral and intellectual background for the war’.16 The bombsites on street level and the aircraft above are contextualised and framed by the stories told from below. The newly found vulnerability of the city during 1914–18 also shaped texts written immediately in the war’s aftermath, especiallyÂ€– and rather more subtlyÂ€– Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). This novel, obviously, invokes the legacy of the war through the shell-shocked soldier’s return, his passage through the indifferent city and eventual suicide. Traces of the war have ‘come home’ and cannot be helped or incorporated into the body politic: indeed, it is the politics of the hysterical male body which puts Septimus beyond help or understanding. But the conflict has not only returned through the corporeality of an individual; it is there in the new ways of thinking about, and most importantly viewing, the city as vulnerable. Early on in the book Clarissa and the general populace look up and interpret a piece of sky-writing, but before they attempt to make a reading they are cast as victims and vulnerable, the very adverb converting them all: ‘the sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd’.17 Even when they can attempt to interpret the signs, they become changed, partly ‘awestruck’ and partly fearful: Dropping dead down, the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps? ‘Glaxo,’ said Mrs Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up. ‘Kreemo,’ murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleep-walker.18

16

Reading the Ruins

The banality of whatever product is being spelt out does not eclipse the power of the airborne medium; indeed, ominousness leaks through in the writingÂ€– in the aircraft’s ‘dropping dead down’ and in the baby’s ‘lying stiff and white’. But the acrobatic play of the planeÂ€– as it shoots in and out above the crowds, beyond the limits of description ‘whatever it did, Â�wherever it went’, and ultimately into the consciousness of the various spectatorsÂ€– foreshadows a synoptic vista in fiction that can encompass the sublime as well as the quotidian. Work on Woolf and aeriality has itself an interesting genealogy, for the richness of the material even in this passage alone is notable; and the interaction of the political with the interiority of the spectatorsÂ€– alongside premonitions of another dimension, one both spatially and mentally irreducible to ground-based metaphorsÂ€– operates in various ways throughout her work.19 But as well as novelists, social critics and military commentators were quick to see how, in the aftermath of limited air raids, their extrapolation would cause chaos. Basil Liddell Hart’s Paris; or, The Future of War, published in the same year as Mrs Dalloway, typifies this: ‘Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish?’20 T h e i n t e rwa r i m ag i n at ion ‘It isn’t war to burn wounded children alive, to poison them with poison gas. It isn’t war. No decent civilised nation would do it.’ Nobody paid attention to these futile words.21

This moment of compassion, studiously ignored, is in Day of Wrath, one of Joseph O’Neill’s novels of war as a limitless horror. It is a text of logical extrapolation and concerned with the pornography of destructionÂ€– and is typical of its genre: the interwar war scare work. The bleak apparent certainty that future wars would extend far beyond a geographical circumscribed ‘battlefield’, would fail to observe distinctions on weaponry or limits on tactics, and would equally target civilians as well as those conscripted, were some of the direct lessons in the aftermath of the First World War. Moreover the possibilities discovered for air warfareÂ€– especially the strategic role of the airship or bomberÂ€– had profound consequences on both popular culture and military planning in the interwar period, and the impossibility of fully separating the two is now acknowledged and explored by both literary critics and historians.22 Interwar figures such as


17

J. F. C. FullerÂ€– tank commander, friend of Aleister Crowley and, latterly, expert on yogaÂ€– wrote passages such as the following in books intended for civilian and military readerships: ‘I believe that, in future warfare, great cities, such as London, will be attacked from the air, and that a fleet of 500 aeroplanes each carrying 500 ten-pound bombs of, let us suppose, mustard gas, might cause 200,000 minor casualties and throw the whole city into a panic within half an hour of their arrival.’ The language of numerical accounting of payload and squadron size is then replaced with the extraÂ� polation of fears and the full unloading of what such ‘panic’ might entail, through incremental horrors and metaphors of helplessness: Picture, if you will, what the result will be: London for several days will be one vast raving Bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. What of the government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate his terms, which will be grasped at like a straw by a drowning man. Thus may a war be won in forty-eight hours and the losses of the winning side may be actually nil!23

An enormous range of popular novels in the interwar period portrayed London being destroyed by various gases, bombs, heat rays and even more exotic armaments, and so rendered an utterly uninhabitable ruin. These works are not just worthy of attention as historical sources or as cultural corollaries to War Office directives, despite being, in the carefully damning judgement of Martin Ceadel, ‘appalling and dreadful in both the original and modern senses of the word’.24 For beyond their repetitiousness, generic lumpiness, and continual recourse to clunking plots and crass stereotypes there are good reasons to understand these works as diagnoses of horror. They are also vehicles for exploring how the fear of the bombed cityÂ€– an experience to be constructed from extrapolations and lurid imaginingsÂ€ – could be shaped into words. There have been some notable studies of this genre of ‘prophetic and alarmist “next war” fiction’, as Ceadel terms it.25 I wish to focus rather more tightly and move beyond assessments of the genre to try and understand not just the lure of airborne omnipotence as a trope, but to examine how and why the cities that were overshadowed by the bombers should have been portrayed in such a variety of different ways. U n r e s t i n t h e wa k e of b om b s The concept of the city as militarily vulnerable, both because of its defenceless size and also because of its potential for internal social Â�insurrection, ties fears of the bomber to an earlier set of fictional fearsÂ€– those of invasion.

18

Reading the Ruins

This genre is typified in its earliest modern form by George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), with its depiction of the serried Teutonic ranks landing virtually unopposed and eliminating the confused and feckless defenders with ease. A link between the old and the new paranoias came especially strongly from William le Queux. Hugely prolific, he became famous for the bestselling date specific invasion-scare novels The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and The Invasion of 1910 (1906). The sales of both dwarfed the more crafted intricacies of, say, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which can be regarded aesthetically as probably the greatest invasion fear book. By the early 1920s le Queux had moved from aquatic to aerial assault as a weapon to inflict on Britain. In The Terror of the Air (1920) first Europe, then the world, is threatened with destruction by a nameless and uncapturable plane. From his narrator’s disavowal of language in the very first sentenceÂ€– ‘I have all my life been a man of action rather than of words. I hate writingÂ€– even lettersÂ€– and I detest talking about myself’26Â€– through to his mutely thuggish decisiveness when threatened, this appears to be a novel that could have a lot, ironically, to say about loquaciousness being un-English. Moreover such a laconic-heroic pose, with a lexical set pitched somewhere between sub-Buchan and demi-Henty, is useful when dealing with Esperanto-speaking pirates in the chases that ensue. It becomes clear that the destruction of London is the high point of the novel, after suitable expository groundwork to confirm how this was a new martial age or epoch: ‘this plan had been adapted some years previously when it became clear to the minds of our military experts that when the next war came aerial battles must play a far larger role than old-time contests on sea and land’.27 But when faced with a new form of war, le Queux also posited a new kind of civilianÂ€– a specifically city-dwelling member of the rabble, not to be trusted when the aerial threat becomes apparent: ‘[t]he moral [sic] of the people had broken down under the mysterious menace that hung over the capital’.28 The development of this word is itself intriguingÂ€– what le Queux depicts is a crisis in morale, to be sureÂ€– lassitude, desertions and constant, fearful upward glancesÂ€– but also one of morality, with the social order overturned, culminating in rioting and overt class warfare.29 Anti-Semitism, a continual implicit refrain in next-war fiction of various kinds, here took on a notable characteristic that could be tracked through until the 1930s: The atmosphere before was electrical; the fall of the leaflets let loose the storm. Babel broke forth. Miles away people heard the noise of the shouting and


19

screaming. The scene was bad enough in the purely English districts, but in the East End, in Soho, and similar quarters where Jews and foreigners of all types were still herded together, swamping the native population, the panic was indescribable.30

The poison gas then dropped on Liverpool destroys all food, shades here of a U-boat blockade, and life spirals downwards to a grubby and violent state without foreign troops ever setting foot on the shore. Yet it is also worth considering a novelist whose career also spans the two paranoiasÂ€ – invasion and attack from the airÂ€ – but does so very differently. For the sprawlingly complex and temporally ragged work of H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933) is in many ways a reworking of his The War in the Air (1908), but now with the interest on how a society might be rebuilt from the rubbleÂ€– and how the social strata of internationalism might be recreated from the debris. In this work the ruins of the cities act as totemic warnings, but also as clues to the different stages of human development, stages that can only be fully understood at some putative future point of retrospect. Most of these works make attempts at instilling veracity, or at least verisimilitude, by naming specific points of destruction, or at least by enumerating streets and districts that have been wiped clean off the map. The horrors to come are superimposed upon the geography of quotidian life. Recognisable street names and urban features act to give a synecdochal signal of the corresponding rings of chaos that remain undescribed. For while The Terror of the Air has Trafalgar Square attacked with a single giant ‘torpedo-bomb’, smashing a radius of so many yards that it becomes only ‘torn and ragged, and stones and rubbish’,31 not too much else needs to be sketched in; interpolation performs the rest. In Leslie Polland’s Menace: A Novel of the Near Future (1935) there is a desire to distinguish aspects of the wreckage: ‘was there a Cenotaph or was that also to be numbered among the pieces of shapeless wreckage he had passed on his way’?32 While in Shaw Desmond’s Ragnarok (1926) the destruction carries within it a pre-existing hatred of the city, the imagery of verminÂ€– applied liberally to defend a bomber’s-eye perspectiveÂ€– captures the metropolis in its entirety: ‘then the great grey fungus of London, surely the ugliest thing on earth in its decay. The great slanted radii of drab grey houses … That terrible grey thing seemed to crouch there like a louse’.33 Yet the controlled horror and relative lack of specificity in such overflights gives way to details and texture as the focus moves closer. Here the tropes of regeneration, so important in actual responses to the Second World War bombsites, are prefigured: ‘a little elderberry had taken root in the high wall

20

Reading the Ruins

under Broad Street Station’.34 Eventually the desolation begins to acquire a ‘natural’Â€– non-humanÂ€– life, one that is predicated on understanding a human epoch as eminently replaceable by the reconquest of nature: ‘wild things of fur and feather [were] haunting the ruins and coming back into their own’.35 E x t r a p ol at ion of w e a p ons Despite being apparently predicated on the deferred terrors of the threat, Pollard’s Menace depicts the bombing of London in tedious and excruciating detail; it is precededÂ€– and validatedÂ€– by a foreword from Air Vice Marshall Sir Vyell Vivian: ‘In view of the rapid advances that are taking place in speed, range and carrying capacity of aircraft, it would be a bold person indeed to say that the main outline of this story is fantastic.’36 But ‘The Banshee Avenger’ is not merely extrapolation in the brandishing of military prowessÂ€– ‘Range 5,000 miles, fully loaded weight 25,250, speed 185 mph’37Â€– but rather a scaling up of hysteria, weapons and the possibilities of prose. Initially an inability to comprehend the remaking of the space of battle through air power means the plaintiveness of hopes, for ‘a solid front in a war of beastliness’ evaporates.38 (Indeed ‘beastliness’ is close to ‘frightfulness’, one of the most common British euphemisms for Â�bombing throughout the 1920s.)39 Later in the novel blame is apportionedÂ€– ‘[i]t is the so-called young intelligentsia that are the real root of the growth of Communism’â†œ40Â€ – and recent history comes into play too. Such casual references to ‘that Waziristan show’,41 must mean that the after-effectsÂ€– and successÂ€ – of the British colonial ‘aerial policing’ operation there in the 1920s had enough currency to be used as the template. Scaled up exponentially, it could depict the results of an attack that had ‘London smashed and crippled, thousands of men, women and children killed, maimed and gassed’.42 The phrase ‘knock-out blow’, as illustration for a surprise and overwhelming attack, migrated from the world of boxing to become a key cultural tropeÂ€– and way of conceptualising air warfareÂ€– throughout the interwar years, and had great applicability in both the genres of military planning and in fear-mongering fiction.43 Metaphors of the body politic allow vivid directness: Each side will at once strike at the heart and nerve centres of its opponent; at his dockyards, arsenals, munitions factories, mobilization centres, and at those nerve ganglia of national moraleÂ€– the great cities. The air raids of the past are


21

no guide as to the nature of future aerial attack, or even of that which could be delivered to-day … There is no need to enlarge upon the results of aerial bombardments with high explosive, incendiary, and poison gas, delivered by thousands of bombers.44

Overviews of interwar novels dwell continually on the doctrine of overwhelming force. As Wright puts it: ‘Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922) envisages England bombed back into the stone age. In The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) Anderson Graham has Britain pulverised by African and Asian bombers. While the same racist fantasies are displayed in Shaw Desmond’s Ragnarok, in which the French attack London with gas and fire-bombs, while their black African allies … wait in the countryside to rape and slaughter the fleeing Londoners’.45 The absolutely decisive nature of such an attack is depicted through the extrapolation of weapons from the First World War, scaling them up and adding technoÂ� logical refinements. The cityscapes envisaged after such attacks were places of absolute devastation. It is a gas attack that forces the transformation of the effete and mannered hero of The Poison War (1933), turning him into a survivor who is prepared to kill and pillage, as he voyages through a landscape intersected with poisoned traffic jams and feral local warlords. He needs to do this as London is destroyed by the gas, and the lists of street names are now coupled with lists of the dead. Thus ‘there was no sign of any human activityÂ€– no sound of any human being’,46 apart from the debonair drunkard who maintains his sanity through looting new clothes every day and breakfasting in Buckingham Palace. The hero cannot allow himself such baroque pleasures; rather, the discipline and structures needed to cope with catastrophe have to be self-enforced among the plunderers and the enervated lassitude. Days are arranged so that ‘by adhering strictly to this programme he managed to secure for himself a certain amount of emotional peace’.47 Ultimately, however, ‘London was a charnel house’,48 and hope springs from agrarian and rural remakingÂ€– in ways reminiscent of Eric Gill’s artistic community at DitchlingÂ€ – and the generic tropes of interwar anti-modernity: ‘[a]nd the big winds blew and there were the endless variations of mist and rain, and in this “new” old England, the two products of twentieth-century civilisation and culture, with all their prejudices washed away from them, lived useful lives’.49 In O’Neill’s Day of Wrath (1936) there can be no useful lives in the aftermathÂ€ – and indeed the horrors that lie in wait become plain from the start. The inevitability of destruction is taken as a given: ‘[t]he nation that lived in great cities would be doomed from the outset’.50 But beyond

22

Reading the Ruins

the overt extrapolations of weapons this novel has a mournful melancholic edgeÂ€– the comparison is made between Sydney (reached by rocketplane from London) and PompeiiÂ€– thereby subverting a continual trope of New World survival. As the ‘plane was moving back slowly from the dead city’51 the realisation comes to the characters that despite watching ‘these pitiful manikins running this way and that’ there was to be no escape; for mechanisation has overtaken any human control as the bombs fall continuously: ‘every single bomber a robot’.52 The continual juxtaÂ� positions between the advances in technology being displayedÂ€– and the strained normality of the reactions to themÂ€– becomes more pronounced throughout, and the heaping up of menace and deathly fear in suburban settings leads at points to excruciating bathos: ‘It was a calvary of humanity … The hedge of the lawn was broken down in several places’.53 Shaw Desmond’s Chaos (1938) is in many ways a reworking of his RagnarokÂ€– but with the ‘castration gas’54 that makes its appearance towards the end of the novel only adding to the putrefying flesh. These fantasies now fight with details seemingly from the Spanish Civil War, such as the ‘flights to the tubes’ and subsequent catacomb life, and the novel becomes strangely more plausible. Indeed, the lasting effect of Spain on many kinds of warthreat texts in the late 1930s was to give extrapolations such as O’Neill’s and Desmond’s detailed specificity, and also a direct political import. L e s s ons of Spa i n ‘This book is intended for the ordinary citizen, the sort of man and woman who is going to be killed if Britain is raided again from the air.’55 So the scientist and communist activist J. B. S. Haldane began his book A.R.P.Â€– a product of his trips to the Republican-held areas during the Spanish Civil War, and an instructional compendium of reporÂ�tage, suggestion and myth debunking. What war might actually mean for BritainÂ€– and what onus for preparation lay with individuals and governmentsÂ€– became for military figures and writers one of the key lessons of Spain, and one instilled by a variety of literary forms.56 Against the various lurid visions of the uses of air power that proliferated throughout the 1930s there were facts, verifiable and delivered by newsreel. In the wars in Abyssinia and in China, bombing aircraft were used with increasing frequency by the Italians and Japanese respectÂ� ively against towns and cities, and the concept of mass civilian deaths and an actual ruinscape usurping civilisation was documented. But it was the Spanish Civil War that had the greatest effect on British culture


23

and fear. The reasons for this include Spain’s proximityÂ€ – it was, after all, another European countryÂ€– the intensity of the fightingÂ€– bombing became central to the Nationalists’ tacticsÂ€– and, perhaps most importantly, the availability of detailed knowledgeÂ€– as far more reporters and photographers were in Spain than in either of the other conflicts.57 What became pertinent and politically interesting is the way both poetry and non-fictional reportage used the image of the bombsite and the bomb victim to both stimulate solidarity for SpainÂ€ – and to warn Britain of the fate that awaited them. Haldane’s book is remorselessly practical: it instructs, observes, and orders experienceÂ€ – including his ownÂ€ – and itemises terror so that it becomes just another physiological response. The drawings and diagrams it presents attempt to render the city under attack into a knowable, variegated spaceÂ€– one house still standing while another burnsÂ€– rather than the wastelands imagined by alarmist writers. But it is counterpointed with other kinds of writingÂ€– and other modes of warning. Notable and notorious was that provided by Guernica, a small town in the Basque region of northern Spain. The story of the attack by the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion on 26 April 1937 was subsequently altered, spun and rewritten throughout the war and afterwards. George Steer’s immediate reports capture the effect of concentrated bombing: In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war material lay outside the town and was untouched. So were two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.58

The literary and cultural responses to this attack have been tracked in detail by those interested in analysing interwar fears, the effects of propaganda and the possibilities of an aesthetic response as solidarity.59 Patterson in particular has calibrated well how the shock waves that travelled out from the attack on the Basque town impacted on European culture, and he explores how fears of bombing altered what was then written, how it was written and how it was read. T. S. Eliot was at his most disdainful, repeating the claim in the Tablet that the most likely perpetrators were ‘the Basque’s own allies, their shady [i.e. Anarchist] friends in Catalonia’.60 But as the evidence for the German attack mountedÂ€– Â�notably in reports by Steer for the Times and that presented by the MP Philip Noel-BakerÂ€– Guernica became a potent symbol of military aggression, of the lies of a non-intervention policy, and of civilian vulnerability. As Patterson points

24

Reading the Ruins

out: ‘It was the first time that a completely unmilitarised, undefended, ordinary civilian town in Europe had been subjected to this sort of devastating attack from the air.’61 Yet the symbolic weight of Guernica has, paradoxically, led to a more limited understanding of what bombing meant in SpainÂ€– and to understanding what was in store for London. John Langdon-Davies, a journalist in Spain and a propagandist for the Communist PartyÂ€ – and denounced as such by Orwell in Homage to CataloniaÂ€– also wrote a warning book that resorts to rather different tropes. In Air Raid (1938) he returns again and again to the specifics of the attacks on Barcelona by the Italian air force, flying in from bases in Majorca to attack, as it was claimed by their spokesmen, only the concentrations of war industries and the harbour. But as Langdon-Davies sets up clearly, this was sophistryÂ€– ‘there may never be a raid on London but, if there is, March in Barcelona saw the dress-rehearsal’62Â€– for in those raids the bombsite spreads to become the city. While Haldane emphasised the physical and practical responses on the ground, Langdon-Davies was concerned with the psychological tactics: ‘In short, twenty-six minutes of visits from half a dozen bombers themselves scarcely in danger destroyed the whole mental life of a million and a half people for forty hours.’63 Such arguments about the effect of the bombs on mental lifeÂ€– effects prompted by the tactics that Langdon-Davies refers to in the subtitle of his bookÂ€ – were however secondary in the popular imagination to the danger of annihilation to towns and cities. In a poem for Left Review in March 1938, Edgell Rickwood also attempted to read bombsites as Â�lessons, and tried to use them to induce, at the most basic level, British solidarity from self-interest: Euzkadi’s mines supply the ore To feed the Nazi dogs of war: Guernika’s thermite rain transpires In doom on Oxford’s dreaming spires: In Hitler’s frantic mental haze Already Hull and Cardiff blaze, And Paul’s grey dome rocks to the blast Of air-torpedoes screaming past.64

De pic t i ng c a s ua lt i e s The poster depicted in Figure 1 was used throughout the civil war, in modified forms, both within Spain but also for various European and American assistance organisations that attempted to help the Republic.


25

Figure 1â•‡ ‘If you tolerate this’, poster, 1936–9

W. H. Auden saw it when he visited Valencia in January 1937, including it as the culminating image in his list of the visual delights of the Republic: ‘Altogether it is a great time for the poster artist and there are some very good ones … In photomontage a bombed baby lies couchant upon a field of aeroplanes’.65 Auden’s entire report has been subject to a milder version of the critique (and odium) loaded upon his poem ‘Spain’. Part of this can be blamed on the insouciance of his tone that persists throughout,

26

Reading the Ruins

typified notoriously in his slick phrase ‘The foreign correspondents come in for their dinner, conspicuous as actresses’.66 But part of the critique deals with the morality of the aestheticising observer, the disconnection between what is being seen and how it can be written aboutÂ€– a question more usefully explored by some other poets. The photograph the poster is based on is of the head and upper torso of a dead child. He has been laid on the ground and tagged with two white labels for identification, each carrying large black numbers. The child’s hair is blown back and away from the body and appears clotted with blood. The eyes are ruptured and the mouth is open. It still retains its power as an icon of pain, and as a dramatic representation of the horror of war.67 Yet merely to note this is to make an ahistoricist move that elides much. The image also typifies a moment when, with the growth of air power, civilian populations were being targeted, in Abyssinia and China as well as Spain. The images that testified to such targeting, for example in the photographs of Robert Capa from Manchuria or those of Gerda Taro in Spain, return again and again to the dead child as an ultimate horror.68 It was rather taken at some point during the initial bombing raids on Madrid late in 1936, as soon as the Nationalist forces realised they would not take the city before winter arrived and the defence lines hardened.69 But its complex afterlife in poetry, and hence in the possibility of finding a form of empathy for victims of bombing, could not have been predicted. In late May 1939, nearly two months after the final surrender of the Spanish Republic, while the newly victorious General Franco was receiving fawning ambassadors from the European powers, and the French government had begun to move from their open-air prison cages the Republican refugees who had fled into southern France, an anonymous Elegy on Spain was published from a Manchester bookshop. This long poem, constructed around an apostrophe to a dead child, tried to mourn the defeat of the Spanish Republic, and made an impression upon the cultural consciousness. By 1941 Francis Scarfe identified it as being by George Barker and stated with certainty its relative place in the hierarchy: ‘Of all the poems bearing on the Spanish War, Barker’s poem will stand with the highest, next to Auden’s “Spain” and not below it.’70 When Elegy on Spain was subsequently collected, in Barker’s Lament and Triumph (1940), it carried an explanatory subtitle: ‘Dedication to the photograph of a child killed in an air raid on Barcelona’.71 This was not however necessary in the original slim volume from 1939. This edition had a reproduction of the actual photographÂ€– used in the posterÂ€– tipped


27

in so to face the recto page that carried the two introductory stanzas. Other works, even those that apparently respond only to the photographic image rather than the emotional narrative and assembly skills contained in the poster, can trip on their own ironic commentary. F. L. Lucas’ ‘Proud Motherhood (Madrid, ad 1937)’ attempts to make an empathetic leap: Jose’s an imp of three, Dolores’ pride. ‘One day’, she dreamed, ‘he’ll be Known far and wide.’ Kind Providence fulfils Dolores’ guess Her darling’s portrait thrills The foreign press. Though that’s no wreath of bay About his hair: That’s just the curious way Bomb-splinters tear.72

Barker’s response to the image is utterly different, but difficult to place initially. This is the first stanza in its entirety: O ecstatic is this head of five-year joyÂ€– Captured in its butterfly rapture on a paper: And not the rupture in the right eye may Make any less this prettier than a picture. O now, my minor moon, dead as meat Slapped on a negative plate, I hold The crime of the bloody time in my hand.

(L 71)

There initially seems a prurient amorality hereÂ€ – what sort of dead child could be ecstatic?Â€– but closer readings show that this is not precisely akin to Auden’s postures. Rather, it contains a movement where, despite the reversals and elisions (especially in lines three and four), an aesthetic reaction is shown as solidifying to a political judgement. The rhyming of ‘rapture’ with ‘rupture’ seems to justify those, such as Adrian Caesar, who see this poem as belonging to a school of aestheticising callousness which sounds only ‘a horribly hollow ring’;73 yet this abstracting quality also draws attention to the materiality of the image, rather than just the child. A knowledge of its mediated state means that the ‘negative plate’ is now loaded with existential nullity but also functions as an actual object. The printing process can then produce another object, with the final line containing the

28

Reading the Ruins

double meaning of ‘bloody’, bringing in corporeality and anger, trapped between the ‘crimeÂ€– time’ rhyme, a judgement that invokes temporality. Thus Barker writes himself in as an observer, capturing with the strangeness of the child’s posture, his own reactionÂ€– and moral judgement. Elegy on Spain comprises two introductory stanzas that directly address the photograph, and then three parts of seven-line or eight-line stanzas. These stanzas work cumulatively towards interlocking at a level of the images and also in the particularity of the form Barker chooses. The last word–first word rhyme scheme that dominates the poem, a form of anadiplosis or ‘diagonal rhyme’, is shown here with my emphases on the first stanza of section 1: The hero’s red rag is laid across his eyes, Lies by the Madrid rock and baptizes sand Grander than god with the blood of the best, and Estramadura is blazing in his fallen hand. All of a fallen man is what is heaven’s: Grievance is lowered to a half-mast of sorrow, To-morrow has no hand in the beat of his breath, and after Laughter his heart is hollow.

(L 71–2)

The diagonal rhymes are imperfectÂ€– especially in the stumble ‘heaven’s … grievance’Â€– and incomplete, sometimes not using end words and sometimes twisting or ignoring syllables to fit. But they give a spine for a reader to move through the poem, layering additional weight, in the certainty and reward that comes in the enjambment. The action of connection becomes the guiding technical point, but the attention it draws to the act of reading aloud, ‘for recitation’, is surely part of Barker’s wider project of re-establishing the physical bodyÂ€– and not just the mindÂ€– as key for empathetic attention to the subject, a point raised by Desmond Hawkins in his review.74 This reification of connection also shapes the interlocking nature of the subject matter and the allegorical value placed on it. Each section is devoted to the exploration of a different creature undergoing pain and then death, with a moral being taken from it. The model for this comes in the introductory stanzas that focus upon the child, giving the poet a point of contact that provokes, from the gaze of the ruptured eye, the poem as response to the ‘endeavour’. In the first section there is the death of the ‘hero’; in the second the death of ‘red bull, proud as a hero’ in the ring; and in the third it is the turn of Madrid, animated into life where ‘she’ gazes up at the circling ‘Junker angels in the sky’, with her streets being those of the ‘bull’s-eye capital’ (L 75).


29

The three interlocking loci of pain allow Barker to bring to bear his typically expansive spread of imagery and linguistic play, but here both the structure and the mesh of the form keep the poem from the conÂ�tinual uncertainties of works such as ‘Elegy II’. This can even contain the resurgent tropes of Calamiterror: the violence of the ‘x’ that marks the spotÂ€– ‘the axis pinning Spain through the breast’ (L 73)Â€– or the organicist revival that sprouts from withinÂ€– ‘burst breast like an aster’ (L 74). Even the prolonged punning that can take up entire stanzas is channelled back into finding the right form for mourning, or deciding what can be gleaned from a situation to provide hope. The following two lines, from the seventh stanza of the second section, shows the possible homophonic alternatives: ‘At evening the sky is red over us all. / Shall our fiery funeral not raise tomorrow also?’ (L 74). The other aural possibilities hereÂ€– ‘read’ and ‘raze’Â€ – are definitely present, but they lead to a meaning no more totalisingly coherent than the first. Yet this opening of possibility then gives another dimension to the questing urge for mourning. To paraphrase: the search for signs in the red sky, in a shepherd’s-delight-like way, gives the colour red to ‘read’, the persistence of progressive hope. ButÂ€– in the next lineÂ€ – such redness, from the fiery defeat, can both build and destroy (‘raze/raise’) a possible future. This uncertainty, revealed by the polyvalence of the puns, mitigates against the elegy achieving a conventional political focus. By the final section the emotional weight of the poem has, however, shifted subtly. The process of mourning is now a question of memoriÂ� alising, and of finding memorials that are not physically simple, analogies ossifying into emotionless stone. The tear found ‘blooming’ all over Spain in section 1 now has to be converted into something that will have equal emotional validity, but a longer endurance, a ‘crystal memorial’. The penultimate stanza lays this out more directly: ‘Lost / O my ghost, the first fall, but not lost / The will to have liberty which shall have liberty / At the long last’ (L 76). The abstractions of the ‘will’, when set beside the lessons in heroism from the dead figures, can seem opaquely naive; this is a tutelary spirit that lobs resistance into metaphysics and therefore, ‘at long last’, can take the longest of long views. The attempt honestly to interrogate a defeat and a death, and then see what remains, is also the intent of a prose piece, perhaps Barker’s most significant of 1939. It stands as a direct companion to Elegy on Spain, but also nuances and alters it. In ‘Funeral Eulogy on Garcia Lorca’ there are no blooded archetypes. Rather there is a singular influential presence, a real poet to be mourned: Fredrico Garcia Lorca. Shot by the fascists in Grenada in 1936, Lorca had,

30

Reading the Ruins

posthumously, gained a wider British readership, and his death was seen as the ultimate cultural proof of the Nationalists’ barbarity. Again, as with others of Barker’s prose texts from 1938–9, this is a densely compact piece, with a highly abrasive tone and continually up-ratcheted emotion, lauding the poet as the ‘rarest and most prized of humans’ before trying to lay out what meaning could be gleaned from his death. The vocative impulse, strong in Elegy on Spain, is even more marked here through the oratorical demands of the poetic form. The fixation on the wounded eye is as strong here as it is in Elegy on Spain; and indeed as it had been in all the works since Barker’s accidental blinding of his brother in 1934. But ‘the needle of war in the eyeball’ that pierced Lorca was not just a simple ‘Falangist Dagger’ that would allow the reader to see him, and his death, in strictly propagandist terms. Indeed Barker’s rhetoric here is remarkably neutral, making no distinction between the ‘factions’ and framing the war as a natural calamity: ‘he died during a thunderstorm to which we have given the name The Spanish Civil War … by the militant violence of opposed factions between which his bluebird was crushed’.75 Such efforts are also in the power behind Elegy on Spain. The poem closes with the generative power of sorrow reworked as a literary urge: ‘Go homeward with tears to water the ground. / All this builds a bigger plinth for glory, / Story on story, on which triumph shall be found’ (L 76). The echo of the constructed ‘storey’ behind the ‘story’ shows something of how the monument or memorial will rise; but it will come from the physical sources of the tears and the dead bodies ‘staining the walls and cluttering the drain’ of previous lines. The possibility of socialist-realist heroic poses or verses to fill the ‘plinth’ are negated, for death and total defeat, the subject of Elegy on Spain, was not tractable to such constructions. But Barker’s plinth, by being composed of both storey and story, foregrounds the enduring and amorphous strength of the literary, a form of remembering that can rise over immediate defeats. Barker’s transformation of a bombing victim into a way of thinking through the limits of poetryÂ€ – and responses to an imageÂ€ – shows how the bombsite was already a space that offered possibilities for aesthetic engagement that outstripped reportage or denunciation. Thinking through the chiasmus in Barker, of the city as the body and the body as a city, is valuable as it shows how poetry could engage with and yet transform suffering. Conceptions of the body as a human marker for the bombsiteÂ€– and its poetic, homophonic literalisation in blinded eyes and bombed sightÂ€– is thus a way of marking the human cost of aerial strategy, and recording a human scale to suffering.


31

1939 a n d a l l t h at This chapter has so far analysed fears about the vulnerability of the city to attack from the air, and the literary representations of such fears, over the decades leading up to the Second World War. These were mutually interlocking relationships between war as practised and literature as written, with air vice marshals taking ideas from novels, and science fiction writers scaling up biplanes into omnipotent rocket-ships. It was a literature of both reportage and imaginative excursions, of political warnings and lurid extrapolation. But texts written on the very periphery of war, especially those of 1939 itself, bring a qualitatively different form of fear to the page. Premonitions of what the bomber would bringÂ€– and might meanÂ€– for Londoners in particular became the subject, whether overt or coded, for a number of major writers. Yet simply to write of ‘the literature of 1939’ is both useful and disingenuous; for to attempt to unify some disparate texts through the device that they are ‘about’ or ‘preoccupied by’ 1939 is to ignore the fact that the most interesting works were composed at various points between 1938 and late 1940. Indeed it may be worth contemplating the mutability of the calendar when faced with culture reacting toÂ€– or escaping fromÂ€– the overwhelming events of the public sphere. Pace cultural theorists or historians who insist upon the ‘long eighteenth century’, or indeed formulations about the short twentieth century,76 it would be worth considering the uses of a ‘prolonged 1939’ for literary analysis.77 The conclusion of this chapter proceeds on such a basis, drawing a purlieu around a period whose works do not belong to histories of the 1930s, nor to studies of war writing. This frame thus can logically stretch from the Munich crisis in the summer of 1938 to April–May 1940, with the end of the ‘phoney war’ and the German invasions of Norway, the Low Countries and France. An example of such elastic historicisation comes from Henry Green: ‘My London at war in 1939 begins in Eire in 1938. It was Munich, just upon us.’78 The literature that emerged at the close of the 1930s directly sought to acknowledge and contemplate how the brutalities of aerial bombardment in the coming war would be visited upon the British city in the immediate future, in characteristic spirit of the brink. Such literature is now worth reading as a coherent corpus, and it is instructive to make interlocking comparisons. For when seen together generic differences only confirm the tropes of inevitability, vulnerability and the perpetual shadow of the bomber. Realism about the effects of bombingÂ€– non-cataclysmic and yet pervasiveÂ€– is matched by a fatalism that emerges and challenges narrative

32

Reading the Ruins

form in a variety of ways still relatively untheorised or analysedÂ€– either by contemporary writers or by subsequent critics. Caught on a historical and canonical cusp, the works of the ‘expanded 1939’ have faded from cultural sight, or have been reduced to addenda in studies of the respective authors. To reawaken such works, this chapter will now use two pairings, placing writers together to reveal differing formal approaches to common fears and ending upon perhaps the greatest work ‘of’ 1939, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, a novel completed in the spring of 1941.

E pi s odic l o s s e s of pe r s pe c t i v e The work of elucidating a cultural fascination with aeriality, or ‘airÂ�mindness’, throughout the 1930s has been performed astutely by numerous critics. The points of view available to the hawklike helmeted airman in Auden, or the Italian Aeropitura painters have been tracked and found redolent of concepts from the sublime to the comic.79 But the complex ways in which aeriality, as a way of understanding self and cityscape, becomes a tool in some very particular texts of 1939 is still worth noting. Louis MacNeice and Virginia Woolf both completed works at the end of the 1930s that were different in many formal respects: poetry rather than prose, intimate narration rather than layers of artifice and performance. But they shared a dominant common characteristic: they were both fearfulÂ€ – and used the manipulation of the narrative viewpoint both as an explanation and an accentuation of that fear. But these works strangely present fear as an episodic emotion, arriving in waves or flashes and then apparently vanishing into quotidian faux normalcy for sustained periods. Their fears are of course represented episodically in differing ways: the form of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939) relies upon differing moods, and modes isolated into the individual poems, which act as diary entries; while Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) makes the episodic a diagnostic cultural form in order to understand EnglishnessÂ€ – and therefore embeds the interrupted performance of a pageant as the central, most fractured, and itself (in)conclusive episode in the novel. Fear still does transcend the episodes in numerous ways, but it is manipulation of the point of view, and thus the apparent scale of the scene glimpsed, that has been so far neglected in studies of either writer. For tropes of fear linked to such manipulation allow the aeriality inherent in the works to appear and then vanish, if not into the subconscious then at least off into the horizon of the next page or ten.


33

Between the Acts opens with a discussion of the cloacal mundanities of septic tanks, but escape comes with the migration of the narrativeÂ€– and implicit eyeÂ€– upwards to give a longer, cleaner, more expansive view. This vision is unmistakeably aerialÂ€– and in being aerial it reveals historÂ� ical continuitiesÂ€ – and the palimpsestic history of British vulnerability in war: ‘from an aeroplane, he said, you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars’.80 The conception that the land bears witness to the past, and will allow history to emerge, is a strong and potent one. The echoes here are of Kipling’s ‘Puck’s Song’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) with the desire to ‘read’ stories from the marks on the land: See you the dimpled track that runs, All hollow through the wheat? O that is where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip’s fleet …81

Kitty Hauser’s work on Kipling’s potency in interwar literatureÂ€– and especially the way he was used by EliotÂ€– is a perceptive way of opening the field for what she usefully terms ‘the archeological imagination’.82 Woolf herself depicts the tendency for decoding a past alongside a desire to graft imagination on to the remains. A key moment in Between the Acts concerns the possibility of whatÂ€ – when promptedÂ€ – the eye can disclose: ‘“Once there was no sea,” said Mrs Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading that in a book this morning. There was rhododendrons in the Strand and mammoths in Piccadilly”’ (BTA 29–30). In Autumn Journal time is also mutable, with visits to both a personal and a classical past. But here it is the hawk’s-eye view that truly comes into its own, decoding Trafalgar Square and the Spanish landscapeÂ€– but also the suburban clutter of ‘black roofs / And the one black paint brush poplar’.83 For both works there cannot be a still point from which to observe: spatial restlessness is matched by momentary clarity when fear is explicit. And to this is how both works obsess over perception and scale. Woolf’s use of the interaction between the earthbound and the aerial as a zone for both symbolism and also narrative had developed in convoluted ways since Mrs Dalloway. By 1939–40 her view of sky-writingÂ€– and, indeed, aeriality and its manipulation of fears into the aestheticÂ€– is the context for reading Between the Acts. Yet this text needs itself to be held against two essays of the late 1930s: ‘Flying over London’ (pre-war but only published in 1950) and ‘The Death of the Moth’ (1940). These play

34

Reading the Ruins

with both durationÂ€– and with the fear of the air and fear of what will come from the air. Together these show how the threat of the bomber looms over Miss LaTrobe’s pageantÂ€– despite it being in Sussex and with no overtly urban target as a backdrop. Both essays contain vivid and vertiginous excursions in the alteration of perspective: In ‘Flying over London’, which appears to be the record of a day-tripper’s flight from Croydon aerodrome to see the capital from above, the political import of life is rolled out below the putative observer equally in terms of vulnerabilityÂ€– and thus inconsequence, ‘the dot the size of a blue bottle’84Â€– but also aesthetic pleasure in seeing a painterly version of a reconnaissance panorama: ‘we fell into fleeciness, substance and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together’.85 Towards the end of the essay an attempt is made to fix a point of focus; tracking in on an individual house, a door, a room, a person: ‘then it was a woman’s face, young, perhaps, at any rate with a black cloak and a red hat’.86 But such an attempt, to make an empathetic leap where the view now looks more like an artistic composition than an actual city, acts only to destabilise the position of the narrator: ‘[e]verything had changed its value seen from the air. Personality was outside the body, abstract’.87 Any attempt to ‘animate’ a self would rely upon catching the qualities that are now in flux, and upon making a connection with the ‘millions of insects’ now moving about below. The fact that the whole trip is finally revealed as a mental and not a physical flight does not undermine the case. Rather it shows how the episode of fear, where aesthetic contemplation gives way to an amoral detachment, can be bound up as an episode or excursion. There is only one insect in the grounded, thanatos-darkened ‘The Death of a Moth’. Here an empathetic focus moves closer and closer to the vulnerable alterity of the creature, stuck in weakening spasms on the windowsill. Yet here too a connection between the vulnerable body and the looming threat is a problematically episodic one, moving back and forth over the course of the three pages in blanked off scenes. The connection is explicit in the moral of the story: the inevitable indifference of a world when faced with death. This is literalised in how the narrator picks upÂ€– and then dropsÂ€– her pencil without aiding this creature. The effect of power, rendered from above on a thing of transience, is grimly metaphorical, and proleptic: ‘one could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by the tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, if it had chosen, have submerged an entire city; not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death’.88 Looking


35

up, then looking down; staring from the window, then remembering the moth: the essay jumps back and forth aligning episodes of attention with the fear that this death, so seemingly small and inconsequential, could presage the end of others who, from a suitable vantage point, also might appear as ‘insignificant little creature[s]’.89 Significance from happenstance also haunts Between the Acts, but rather it is the quest for significance, the search for a connective narrative, that might admit to the inevitability of war. The building of an aerodrome is part of the weft of conversation (BTA 47) and the episodes of altered perception track the differing scale of fish gliding in the pond rather than insects (BTA 28). The different parts of the pageant when arranged play outÂ€– but the end of the fete is overshadowed: ‘But there is still a deficit’ (he consulted his paper) ‘of one hundred and seventyfive pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp …’ The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gasped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. (BTA 114–15)

The isolation of the potential of violence into the merely visible realm, either as the imagined bomber’s-eye view, or through compassion for a moth, is now violently and shatteringly eclipsed: the auditory uncontainability of the aircraft not only cuts through a speech but through an actual word. They are not only the ‘music’ they are the noise that does not allow for the control of how things might be seen in differing scales or perspectives. In ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ the issue of scale resolves into a reimagination of the bomber as ‘a little silver insect turning and twisting in the light’.90 MacNeice, too, tracks how the fear of aeriality becomes something that cannot be contained in the episodeÂ€– and he, too, has an ominous interest in insects as redolent of much else: And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily â•…â•… Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’ Buzzing around us as from hidden insects â•…â•… And we think ‘This is wrong, it has happened before

(AJ 14)

Building on the diary form of his earlier works of the decade, notably Letters from Iceland (1937) and the earlier poems charting his trips around the Hebrides, Autumn Journal marks the seasonal flow with a stately progress through the subjective charting of experience: it is a documentary

36

Reading the Ruins

with a narrator’s consciousness trammelled and mannered, if inherent. Yet it is broken into sectionsÂ€ – personal, political, theoreticalÂ€ – and it seeks overall to move by the close into a diagnostic state where, simply by recording the accretion of experience, the vulnerability of selfhood can be understood as itself various and inconstant. Moreover it is held in place, bookended, by specific content in the first and final poems: the ‘noise of the planes that pass / Northward from Lee-on-Solent’ (AJ 3) might seem to fade out but this is never absolute, and even the incantations for sleep in the final poem have to include ‘The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late’ (AJ 82). The spatial range and ambition is demonstrated decisively in Poem 7, with the movement through politics, to the aerial, to the guerrilla, and back to ideology, over four lines: â•…â•…â•… Conferences, adjournments, ultimatums, Flights in the air, castles in the air, â•…â•…â•… The autopsy of treaties, dynamite under bridges, The end of laissez faire. (AJ 22)

Yet so much of the poem seeks to find a space for the isolation and consideration of life as not defined by vertiginous expanses. The retreat to a private sphere is prefigured in the epilogue to his contribution to the Iceland poems, where such space is vulnerable and therefore life worthy of celebrating: ‘Still I drink your health before / The gun-butt raps upon the door’.91 Yet in Autumn Journal the retreat is blocked. It is not the gun butt but the flak gunner who intrudes upon what had been a private space or scene (a bench under a tree on Hampstead Heath); and the space now opens up, offering a broad spectrum of scales to be pried into, from the celestial to the microscopic: â•…â•…â•… They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft, The guns will take the view â•…â•…â•… And searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli With narrow wands of blue. (AJ 23)

The overhead vulnerable view of Trafalgar Square (AJ 66) is obviously part of this trope, but so too are the repeated shadows ‘finger[ing]’ (AJ 6), ‘falling’ (AJ 62) or ‘cast’ (AJ 67) downwards at moments that reintroduce fear into variants of observation. So the work as a whole oscillates and develops as momentsÂ€ – and the rhetoric of realisationÂ€ – bring forth a movement away from the classic falcon-as-bomber, so familiar from the tropes, and book cover art, of the interwar period. Crisis occurs: ‘[w]hile the eagles


37

gather and the petrol and oil and grease / Have all been applied and the vultures back the eagles’ (AJ 27). Yet the airborne position is untenable, for things to be explained, the abject contingency of life as livedÂ€– a dog running loose, the shape of a hat, the memory of a lectureÂ€– drift in again. Fear refuses to be sustained or contained, and consequently there is continual pressure for another disruption of perspective, and thus of thought. Ta rg e t s a n d n a r r at i v e In 1936 the Cabinet Office preparations for air raids kept completely confidential calculations for how many troops would be needed to be based in London. For they were required not to defeat an invader but to deal with the social collapse, and especially the potential for revolutionary insurrection it was feared would accompany sustained bombing.92 Vulnerability was not shared equally in a city, where, as the Communist Party pointedly agitated, the rich could afford private shelters in steel-framed buildings while the slums of the East End were left to make do with railway arches and hastily roofed-in trenches. Two novels of 1939 both reflect class as a determinant of aerial phobia, not so much of the bombs themselves but of what they will bring in their sociallyÂ€– as well as physicallyÂ€– Â�explosive blast wave. Henry Green’s Party Going (1939) and George Orwell’s Coming up for Air (1939) typify their respective authors, and are as unlike each other as it might be possible for two novels of 1939 to be. One has a grand cast holed up in grand hotel rooms overlooking a station concourse, replete with intrigue and stasis, participating in scenes portrayed with elliptical precision and oblique linguistic play. The other is a pilgrimage pursued by a solitary individual, taking in the Betjemanesque horrors he encounters on the Great West Road: including fish sausages that burst ‘like bombs’ when bitten, and the detritus of consumerism in the prosperous Thames Valley that never knew a depression. But a worse fate is coming, and Orwell has his own fears of inevitability ventriloquised and illuminated by the narrator: ‘The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them.’93 But both are novels about the premature moment of near war, the narrative device of imagining how bad things might be before allowing life to resume. The station hotel in Party Going, with its crowd of mutually uncomprehending idle rich, acts as a microcosm; one where the inhabitants are closer, in some ways, to bomb aimers than to potential fellow

38

Reading the Ruins

sufferers or casualties. Looking out over the crowds of commuters, who have been delayed by the fog, the casual remark reveals much: ‘“What targets,” one by him remarked, “what targets for a bomb.”’94 The ultimate post-bombing but bombsite-scarred proof of this thought comes of course in postwar Vienna. From the vantage point at the top of the ferris wheel, overlooking the weary and suitably antlike citizens of the occupied city, Harry Lime challenges morality: ‘“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money …?”’95 Pre-war excursions into similar modes of imaginary violence, even when granted a more conventional vantage point, were of course not limited to characters within Green’s novels. But what such excursions might meanÂ€– to both the texture and the form of the textÂ€– does become a particular issue for Party Going in the way it does not for many other works of the period. An area of contention might be that of how self-knowledge of characters results from narrative form. In both Orwell and Green characters’ culpability in, and acquiesce to, their worldsÂ€ – worlds where the bombs may fall without warningÂ€– mean their selfhoods strain under the pressure of revelations and lacunae in the text. Green’s oblique accretion of detailsÂ€– especially those that fall from the airÂ€– seems only to give a matrix of possibilities rather than causal chains to be directly discerned. Of the pigeon that later, when dead, provokes so much, the encounter begins thus: ‘She turned and went back to where it had fallen and again looked up to where it had died for it was still warm and, everything unexplained, she turned once more into the tunnel back to the station’ (PG 7). Not only in this state of panicked fear does nobody know why they are in the hotel, they also do not know other vital co-ordinatesÂ€– they are held between states of the urban and the rural; and, in the shape of the station, between day and nightÂ€– through the fog which is as enveloping here as in Bleak House. Ultimately, they are positioned in a limbo between life and death: ‘She thought it was like an enormous doctor’s waiting room and that it would be like that when they were all dead and waiting at the gates’ (PG 48). Fear for the characters is at once both then a product and the cause of being between these multiple intersections, to the extent where fear cannot even be vocalised. The multiple polyvalenced riffs through language and the continual movement through differing tenses and grammatical modes provides the energy of the text, but compounds the bewilderment of any character who attempts to work out why the fears of bombing


39

were as insistent as the planes that ‘drone’ (PG 149) overhead through the fog. Against this, the hope that Orwell places in his protagonist George Bowling comes from being a target that knows his place. Resistance is not through running and hiding, but rather in a reformulation that again, as it had done with George Barker, holds the bodyÂ€– in this case his abject, ordinary, middle-aged and fat bodyÂ€– as a possible site of resistance to any doctrine of deathly vertiginous abstraction. From his initial washing and musing on life in the bathÂ€– moving between his ‘pudgy arms’, ‘bluntish razor-blade’ and ‘false teeth’ (CufA 3)Â€– to the encounter with the severed foot on the streets of Lower Binfield, the descriptive economy of the book returns again and again to the verisimilitude being a narrative voice connecting together scenes of the body as the start of knowledge. Self-knowledge ultimately hits against class: the social flirtation within the hotel of Party Going is marked in language and demeanour as being upper; the attempts to know and yet transcend a place hold George Bowling as a mobile member of the lower middle. Class, too, pervades how both novels establish a logic of symbolism; yet such a logic is one that both persuades and complicates the narratives equally. In Party Going the illness that afflicts Miss Fellowes originates, or not, in her bathing of the pigeon’s corpse. The pigeon is only one thing that has ‘fallen’ into the text. The general threatening hum of potentially revolutionary unrest makes the characters apparently about to re-enact or emulate that deathward plunge: ‘Although all those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, in danger of running fatally to earth’ (PG 151–2). For Bowling there is no possibility of being an airman, even one who is so endangered. The expanse of the city spreads out: London stretching on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops, picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives! … Surely they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been used to? Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. (CufA 239)

This is rather unlike Orwell’s own thoughts in The Road to Wigan Pier some two years earlier: ‘For some time past it has been fashionable to say that war is presently going to “wreck civilisation” altogether; but, though the next full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all

40

Reading the Ruins

previous ones seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop to mechanical progress.’96 Now the bombs will destroy the entire vistaÂ€– and all the ‘private lives’ that could be lived hidden from the dominance of aeriality as a viewpoint. But for Orwell the reliefÂ€– or releaseÂ€– at the close is that of bathos: ‘[a]fterwards (I got this out of the newspaper) the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report to say the effects of the bomb were “disappointing”’ (CufA 236). A b om b c a s ua lt y or wa r av e ng e r ? What would ever turn up now? The year was dying, deadÂ€ – what had next year, 1939, in store for him? Netta, drinks and smokesÂ€ – drinks, smokes and Netta. Or a war. What if there was a war? YesÂ€– if nothing else turned up, a war might.97

In Hangover Square (1941), Patrick Hamilton’s great novel of somnambulism and self-loathing, murder and the love of cats, the sunny calm of London in the summer of 1939 contains a bleakly inescapable teleology. Yet Hangover Square is the most complexly problematic of the works that engage with what I have designated the ‘prolonged 1939’. For while set nearly exactly within that calendar year, this is a proleptic work written in retrospect. The action is delineated with precision, between 25 December 1938 and 3 September 1939, and it is thematically and structurally concerned with the inevitability of the coming war, a threat that co-mingles the personal and the political. Yet Hamilton composed it in 1940–1 with all the benefits of hindsight after the actual outbreak of war. Furthermore the deep psychological driver of George Harvey Bone, the main protagonist, is the continued shame of the Munich agreement predicated on to the lives of the characters, which thus offers a shadowy history that stretches back to 1938: ‘he was ashamed then and he was still ashamed’ (HS 32). The simplicity of the plot is a matter of simple bifurcation: throughout the year Bone veers between two states. There is his wastrel circuit of Earls Court pubs, trips to Brighton and forlorn attendance upon Netta, a sadistic actress whose beauty and manipulative indifference radiates outwards like a halo or radio signal. But then there are also his ‘dead moods’ where, with the world dulled outsideÂ€– like the soundtrack gone on a filmÂ€– he moves with certainty towards what he knows he has to do: kill Netta. The reading I therefore wish now to make takes the ‘dead moods’ of Bone seriously because they situate the novel historically and allow its problematic teleology to become more apparent. Overshadowed by the inevitability of both the coming war and his murderous intent, Bone oscillates between


41

his dual states: a shabby and ineffective drunk and, in his ‘dead moods’, a killer with an absolute purpose. It is a novel about dejection and inevitability, but one where language is itself held as partly responsible. Hamilton was not an avowed reshaper of literary forms or even overtly interested; he claimed he could not see any point in poetry written after 1910.98 Indeed his mockery of modernism throughout the 1930s culminated in his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939), a satire on an England organised according to all prevalent clichés and advertising slogans. But this imaginary realm was also whereÂ€– and now Hamilton’s more doctrinaire Marxist rejection of cultural experimentation is apparentÂ€ – the major authors include Ecyoj and Yelxuh (both undisguised through backslang) engaged in more and more introspectively unreadable works as they ‘gaze inward … until they become self-conscious to an ever more tormented degree, and paralysed for effective action accordingly’.99 Yet there is a fair amount of ‘inward gazing’ in Hangover Square, and also enough play with language to keep the apparently conventional details of the descent into the ‘dead moods’ more textually questionable than psychiatrically plausible. In the fourth chapter George travels back towards London in a state of reverie about Netta. Hers is, as he reminds himself, a ‘perfectly commonplace name’ (HS 27). Yet then a linguistic rather than an alcoholic intoxication takes over, as the name ‘was loaded, overloaded with voluptuous yet subtle intimations of her personality’Â€– and these are then discerned in a pseudo-causal chain: The tangled net of her hairÂ€– the dark netÂ€– the brunette. The net in which he was caughtÂ€ – netted. Nettles. The wicked poison nettles from which she had brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing nets. Mermaid’s nets. Bewitchment. SyrensÂ€– the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta. You could go like this foreverÂ€– all the way back to London. But if you weren’t in love with herÂ€– what then? Net profit? 2s. 6d. Net? Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate? Presumably. But in that case, of course, you wouldn’t think about it at all. It was only because you were crazy about her you went on like this. (HS 27)

This has been understood as sub-Joycean in its associative stop–start rhythms, and there are distinct parallels between Leopold Bloom and George Harvey Bone, even beyond their fixations on inconstant women and love of constant cats.100 Yet the specifically Hamiltonian insight reached through association comes at the endÂ€– and this is the proposition that to think in this way is a product of being ‘crazy’ and not an insight

42

Reading the Ruins

into the craziness. Indeed the subsequent examples of wordplay act only to ratchet up the fear that the slipperiness of language discloses the thin surface on which meaning can be madeÂ€– and life transacted. As a ‘dead mood’ falls upon him, Bone is in a taxi with Netta, and he is reminded of having previously indicated a desire: ‘She was saying “Well aren’t you getting out”’, but this phrase contains a meaning out of context, one lost by his sudden ‘clicked’ stateÂ€– ‘What did this mean? “Getting out?” Getting out of what? The taxi? Or some business or concern in which he was the partner with her? What was she talking about? … “I don’t know” he said’ (HS 84). It is a novel rooted in a circuit of repeated and designated arenas for the humiliation of BoneÂ€ – pub, Brighton hotel, Netta’s bedroomÂ€ – and yet there are also dominantly restless and homeless qualities in the continual aimless wanderings. Sometimes the streets are named, sometimes unnamedÂ€– and sometimes time passes indicated only by the array of film times for cinema visits, such as: ‘Astoria, Ger. 5528 Racket Busters (A), 1.35, 4.20, 7.10, 10’ (HS 66). These lacunae of temporal indeterminacy get a linguistic spin when Bone is walking along the seafront from Brighton in a ‘dead mood’ and feels himself to be in Egypt. All he has as a co-ordinate is the name as spoken to him: ‘Port Slade … Slade … Where was Slade? He had never heard of Slade. The Slade School of Art, but not a port, Port Slade. No … And yet there was something familiar about it … Port Said!’ (HS 172). Bathetic release comes in the shape of a laundry van, and language in flux comes out in the wash: ‘A green motor van came past. He saw written on it, in neat gold letters, “the portslade model laundry”. Ah! Portslade! The little green van had saved his lifeÂ€– his sanity!’ But a return to normative meanings, and the apparent ease of designations, will not rescue Bone from his mission to killÂ€– a mission that is open to multiple readings beneath the repeated conventional symbolism. For political readings of this novel abound, and mostly follow the apparently easy schema: Netta and her friends do not just represent fascism in the symbolic realmÂ€– they actually are fascists and boast about it.101 Eventually Bone’s policy of appeasement towards them cracks and the appeasement ends. The symbolism of murdering Netta on the day Britain declares war on Germany clears up all possible ambiguity. This conflation however is only the prelude to Bone’s own psycho-sexual descent to death, his attempts to leave London so he can be reunited with his deadÂ€– and thus pureÂ€– sister in the none too subtle locale of Maidenhead, where no friendly or unfriendly bombs will fall. This seems rather to complicate neat analogies. But this complication can be fruitful when the


43

novel is considered as of its time and also of its time’s particular paranoia: the fear that the city will be destroyed from the air. But Bone in his ‘dead moods’ is also continually doubled as firstly the ‘dumb’ victim, the patsy, the subject or man in the street who things will happen toÂ€– whether he wants them or notÂ€– but also when in these moods he is propelled with a certainty of vengeance and destruction that he will ‘bring down’ upon his victims and their corrupt London society. He is, in short, both a victim and an aggressor; and both of these possibilities owe much to the iconography and fears of the bomb and the bomber. This is an overshadowed novel, perhaps most critically and overtly when the August scene is summarised: Fine, fine, fine … Blue and sunshine everywhere … Fine for the King and Queen in Canada … Fine for the salvaging of the Thetis … Fine for the West Indian team … Fine for the IRA in their cloakrooms … Fine for Hitler in Czechoslovakia … Fine for Mr Strang in Moscow … Fine for Mr Chamberlain, who believed it was peace in our timeÂ€– his â•… umbrella a parasol! … You couldn’t believe that it would ever break, that the bombs had to fall.

(HS 101)

The grim inevitability of that ‘had’ mattered, as it had done to many other writers, but hereÂ€– given the post-hoc prolepticism of the novel being completed in 1941, the term carries a rather different rhetorical weight. This ‘had’ is key to seeing how the novel imagines a futureÂ€– and does it from the security of knowing it both had and had not arrived. That is, the bombs did fall, but the civilian reactions among the bombsites were very different from what ‘had’ been expected with near certainty. B on e a s b om b v ic t i m Bone as victim requires some elucidation: he appears to be merely a weak man in the malignant grip of alcohol and a group of unfriendly friends. But George’s behaviour in his ‘dead moods’, heartily derided by his ‘friends’ as being unlike anything ever heard of before, seems to owe much to a model of victimhood prevalent in the literature both popular and scientific of the 1930s: his numbed wanderings and dulled hysteria are those of the putative ‘psychic victim’ of the air raids, the kind of casualty that any knockout blow should have theoretically produced.

44

Reading the Ruins

In 1938 estimates of the ration of mental to physical casualties was three to one, thus achieving a figure of ‘4,000,000 mental cases in the first six months of war’, and most of these would require hospitalisation.102 The civilian as nervous case and the nerves of the body politic in general had always been a matter of theoretical interest in interwar writings on bombing strategy, from Guilo Douhet to War Office planners.103 Hart’s influential Paris; or, The Future of War made much of the bodily system as an analogy for command, controlÂ€– and most importantlyÂ€– morale; ‘a nation’s nerve-system, no longer covered by the flesh of its troops, is now laid bare, and, like the human nerves, the progress of civilisation has rendered it far more sensitive than in earlier and more primitive times’.104 Throughout 1938–9, despite warnings from Haldane and others who had first-hand experience from Spain, a concentration on psychic casualties continued.105 Indeed it seems as if George could be a textbook case for a condition that never arrived: presaged by the detailed description of a moment of cerebral impact: Click! … Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again … Click! Or would the word ‘snap’ or ‘crack’ describe it better? It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound noise makes when it abruptly ceases; it had a temporary deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead. And yet he was not physically deaf: it was merely that in this physical way alone he could think of what had happened in his head. It was as though a shutter had fallen. It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a snap or a crack. It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could ‘blink’ his brain it would at once be dispelled. A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of film tooÂ€– a ‘talkie’. It was as though he had been watching a talking film and all at once the sound-track had failed. The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world. Life, in fact, which had for him a moment ago been a ‘talkie’, had all at once become a silent film. And there was no music. (HS 15)

Then, after the impact, George walks in a shocked torpor. Aurally, the moods reflect the dreaded impact of falling bombs; the moods are presaged by violent sounds, especially ‘snap’ (HS 15, 161), which punctuate the narrative. Moreover, impact is followed by a post-explosion numbness. ‘Dead moods’ might have ‘a temporarily deafening effect’, but after the ‘snap’ George asks: ‘But what then? What? … Nothing. A blank’ (HS 25). Like a putative civilian in a bombed city imagined on 1930s paranoiac


45

principles, George is one of the mental walking wounded, and his outer and inner worlds are conflated to a point of somnambulistic shuffle. The ‘outer world’ becomes ‘dim and dead’, and George experiences ‘no sensation, no pleasure or pain at all in this world: there was only himself: his dreary, numbed, dead self’ (HS 17): ‘it was as though the people around him, though they moved about, were not really alive’ (HS 83). Against such blank and vulnerable victimhood there is another, radically divergent, way of seeing what the ‘dead moods’ might mean. Recent scholarship has tracked the trope of sleepwalking in political discourse, as well as in the literature of the 1930s. Glyn Salton-Cox has unpicked the political in the morality-shedding notion of somnambulism, beginning with how it forms an obverse to ‘Deutschland erwache!’ in the sloganeering of Hitler, notably so in his speech following the reoccupation of the Rhineland: ‘I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by providence’.106 Orwell’s response in a 1941 essay reworked the sleepwalker trope but also queried it: in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by everyone, thought never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being a sleepwalker.107

With this acknowledged, the vengeance of Bone becomes all the more unsettling; he is both an alien agent of destruction to those in London, but also an exemplar of a mode of national renewal. He knows what he has to do: ‘in this world [of the dead moods] there was something that had to be done’ (HS 84), even if it takes the screwing of the will to the sticking placeÂ€ – ‘he wasn’t going to funk it now’ (HS 196). But until the close of the novel a ‘click’ always brings him back to reality before he can go through with his constantly deferred mission: ‘he felt a bit sorry for her. For he was going to kill her very soon nowÂ€ – tomorrow, or the day after, or in the next few weeks, anyway’ (HS 91). Thus when he finally brings down a fatal judgement on NettaÂ€– looming over her as he drowns her in the bathÂ€ – and annihilates Peter, her Mosleyite thug boyfriend, with a golf club in a precision attack, he confirms his Â�status as both external threat and best of British. Unsurprisingly, such a combination of psychosis and vigilante cannot be sustained, and the reader is left only with Bone’s suicide noteÂ€– and then, as an epitaph for this Â�double bomb victim and avenger, this headline from a ‘sensational picture daily’

46

Reading the Ruins

(HS 281). It is centre justified as a newspaper-board Â�hoardingÂ€– or Â�perhaps a tombstone: sl ays two found gassed thinks of cat

The arc from the imagined bombsites of the 1890s now arrives in the Â�actuality of Londoners’ lives; and the reality of the spaces brought about by incendiary and high-explosive bombs would both exceed and shatter all the templates proleptically offered.

Ch apter 2

A metropolis aflame

Fire is so familiar, fire is everywhere to be seen. Fire needs no definition. This is one reason why it is so difficult to define. Its chemical definition is simple. The difficulty lies rather in the translation of fire into the imagination through such normally expedient channels as canvas and the written word. William Sansom, ‘The Naked Flame’ (1942)1

This acute wariness felt by Sansom, as both a fireman and a short-story writer, about making art from a blazing city, provides a useful point of departure for considering fire, representation and London’s bombsites. A panoply of British writers in the Second World War who attempted to depict the infernos caused by incendiary bombing had the urge to incorpÂ�orate, understand and feature fire in their works. But such an urge was also subject to real and intransigent debates: about what depiction might consist of, and about what moral shadows might be thrown by such an attempt. Sansom’s own worksÂ€– especially the ‘fireman stories’ he wrote from 1941 onwardsÂ€– show one possible form of guarded engagement. Yet writers across a spectrum of forms completed works that transformed the meanings of fire, and also exploited how and why fire could be transÂ�forming. There is a history both to such an aesthetic problem and to its remedies. Extremities of experience can be recounted, or turned into art, or at least forcedÂ€ – albeit with signs of struggleÂ€– within the expectations of established genres. The numerous Antarctic journals of explorers which resulted in the subgenre of the frozen sublime were one obvious exemplar; First World War memoirs, with their guarded indications of the phenomenon of the unrepresentable, another.2 But there are some immediate and practical problems of writing ‘in’ or ‘of’ the Blitz, the conflagrations that accompanied the air attacks on London and other British cities throughout 1940–1. All the works considered in this chapter are those of aftermath, whether written in the 47

48

Reading the Ruins

immediate aftermath in terms of mere hours, or whether considered and shaped by the passage of months and years. The problem then ensues of the movement back and forth, between (relative) safety where composition was possible, and the depiction of a close-quarters encounter with an elemental, destructive and yet compulsively beautiful force. This means that the forms of these works are also shaped by awareness of time, memory and the problem of representation. Templates from various forms of modernist writing were available; those seeking an elemental corollary to the fashioning of art had choices ranging from fire as purgative to creative, and from D. H. Lawrence through to George OrwellÂ€– moreover the cliché ‘playing with fire’ could be, and was, applied to many strands of aesthetic engagement.3 Fire, and especially fire within London used as a weapon of war, presents significant and complex problems for literary creation. Firstly comes the overloaded metaphorical potential; the problem that such an elementÂ€– and moreover such a processÂ€– had been utilised and depicted in literature for so many divergent aesthetic and ideological ends.4 In Second World War London fire was the agent that created, alongside the explosives, the bombsites themselves. It was a difficult element either to readÂ€– or to write. This is because it is transformative, and yet ephemeral; dangerous, and yet, as Sansom wrote, ‘familiar’. It produces lasting transformations, and a variety of approaches became apparent as effectÂ� ive modes of engaging with those changes. Utilising it for elegy is one way to deal with fire; the process of aestheticisation is another. In this chapter I will chart how fire mattered so much, and in so many different ways, for certain major figures. For Sansom it allows disorientation, or rather offers a means for classifying the disorientation and arbitrariness of fate. For Louis MacNeice the ethical-political dimension of the observer, and the process of seeing an interlocutor in the flames, stretch back far before his most famous piece ‘Brother Fire’. In Henry Green’s work fire is always the thing that is held, as it were, within the flame-proof brackets of elliptical literary form. Both T. S. Eliot, with a refashioning of a purgatorial flame,5 and Dylan Thomas, in their different ways, show how you can make elegy from fireÂ€ – by animating with rhetoric the burnt traces it leaves behind. In such attempts at representation the disorder and violence of the bombsites are captured in their moments of creation. In tracking this entwined process of representation the writers of the Blitz meditate on what kind of creation is made possible in this maelstrom, and how that creation might be linked both to the past and to the future of ashen and blasted physical sites.

A metropolis aflame

49

W i l l i a m S a ns om a n d di s or i e n tat ion In ‘Fireman Flower’ (1943), the longest of William Sansom’s flame-fixated short stories, the search the eponymous hero makes through the blazing rooms of a warehouse for ‘the fire’s kernel’ takes him into a world where the certainties of LondonÂ€– and lifeÂ€– become utterly transformed. The smoke and heat conspire together and begin ‘throwing over the whole a film of unreality’,6 adding a sheen to the tactile layers of transformation. The new spatial and temporal insecurity that he then discovers is filled with old friends and new talismanic objects, such as glacier-like melted tallow and doors that vanish, and is both terrifying and exhilarating. Unsurprisingly, on stumbling into an untouched inner sanctum, one that appears to be a preserved domestic scene, he is tempted to give up the search for ‘The seat of the fire?’ and instead take ‘rather a seat by the fire’ (FF 152). But the fireman does not take the proffered chairÂ€– and so the quest continues, as it does in so many of Sansom’s stories of the 1940s. But these are not demi-chivalric or religio-poetic hunts. Rather they are journeys into a cityscape of incendiary bombs and collapsing walls where the ruins of the future are being formed; and thus language and narrative have to strive to find modes of representation for a metropolis in violent flux. Fire transforms everything it touches irrecoverably: solids become liquids, boundaries disappear, and a substance as intangible as smoke becomes an impenetrable barrier. Sansom’s protagonists, and his prose, attempt both to recognise such changes in offering a taxonomy of them, and at the same time to acknowledge the sensory nature of their alterity and resistance to language. Sansom’s prolific writing career stretched from the 1940s to the 1970s, but he completed his most interesting and complex works as a firemanwriter. Moreover, his experiences of fire-fighting, and his reworking of it as he played a version of himself in the Humphrey Jennings’ film Fires were Started (1943), offered much vivid material for him. To describe contingency at its most capricious became the hallmark of his wartime short stories: contingency as governing the initial conditions of buildings, the mood of fellow firemen and the spread of the flames, and even the action itself: ‘[i]n the fighting of fires the unforeseen predominates’.7 Sansom’s continual wariness concerning the appearance and non-repeatability of the world, in short a suspicion of it, fails to capture or account for the excitement and poise of his stories. For they are, despite being concerned with destruction, enamoured of the transformative possibilities of fire, and of how conflagrations make previous, narrative-containing

50

Reading the Ruins

certainties explode or become mutable. Beyond contingency, fire allows disorientation to be part of both the material subject and of the changed parameters of narrative. Issues concerning representation, readability and the verisimilitude of the narrator then become problematic. And all this takes place in shortÂ€– sometimes very short indeedÂ€– stories.8 The theory that the short story as a literary form might have had specific appropriateness to both readers and writers in the Second World War has its own history. Literary historians of 1940s writing have remarked upon it, as indeed did contemporary writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Maclaren-Ross.9 But beyond the immediacy in production and publication, and the near instant reward promised by a short work taking only a single session of reading, there were some other complex and culturally embedded reasons for the genre’s popularity. Rod Mengham convincingly claims that since the teleology of experience in the war was fragmentary, partial, splintered, and the unknown ending was the condition for life as lived, many writers strove against narrative closure or completion. Thus ‘the lull in meaning was most enthusiastically filled by a new enthusiasm for short stories’.10 Studies of the principal vehicle for short story publicationÂ€– Â�magazinesÂ€– confirm this. Short-story writing was a way both for writers to publish works during the war, but also to compose works that embraced or accepted uncertainty, a contingency on a grander historical level to that thematised in Sansom.11 Yet Sansom also knew something of the contingencies that made him a fireman and a short-story writer, and these are captured in his laconic postwar autobiographic piece ‘Coming to London’. Joining the Fire Brigade, he was posted to Hampstead where, billeted in a former school, he ‘[f]illed the lockers with books and prepared, when disengaged, to read out the war. Where plimsolls had been, de Gourmont now nestled, Mann and Motherlant and Jung and Jaspers beamed from holes which hockey-boots had shared with Dr Sloane’s liniment’.12 T i m e wa s awa y Yet ‘reading out’ the war was interwoven with writing it out. Sansom was concerned with both expunging it through the fantastical and fabulabased stories he composed; and, conversely, with scripting a removal of conflict myths and certainties in his ‘fireman’ stories, with their dimension of truthful reportage, from the scene of chaos. For in the works he wrote in London fire stations, Sansom explores and revels in what contingency might do to the short story. Thus his texts play both with

A metropolis aflame

51

fragmentary partialityÂ€– the sensation, the second, the glanceÂ€– and with a recursive reflexivity that allows characters to analyse such fragments, which thus also acknowledges the partiality and subjectivity of their own attempts to fix narrative. To compose a short story with such layers is to be aware of an inheritance from Mansfield and Lawrence, both writers Sansom read avidly during the pre-war period; but such palimpsestic layering and complex self-awareness also meant a dialogue with documentary reportage and concepts of how the significant fragment might reveal a collective unconscious. Writing for magazines and journals throughout the war, Sansom’s first collected set of stories appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1944, with the remainder of his wartime writing contained in subsequent volumes that followed over the next few years.13 In them Sansom plays with the limits of what is mutable or distortable due to fireÂ€ – and how far a narrative that attempts to capture such dislocations can be preserved. A distortion of the perception of time with regards to fire-fighting had become sufficiently common for Stephen Spender, another fireman-writer, to remark upon it in terms of recognition: ‘Here I experienced the loss of time sense which I had heard spoken of. I was alone with an elementÂ€ – fireÂ€ – as much as if I had been alone in a patch of sunlight by a pool of water in the centre of a forest … Time is measured only by incidents within that spacious changelessness’.14 The isolated temporal incident which gives a recalibration of time, and a starting point in a narrative, is also there in Sansom’s earliest published story, ‘The Wall’Â€– a vignette apparently written in its entirety on 2 April 1941, his only rest-day during the Blitz.15 Since published and republished frequently, it has come to stand in as totemic of Sansom’s entire output.16 For ‘The Wall’ makes use of what Mark Rawlinson has labelled ‘narrative de-acceleration’;17 that is, it expands the ‘timeless second’ of a fireman’s totalising and newly awakened perception that transforms him just as a warehouse wall falls upon him. But the delineation of inconsequential mundanity without knowable form or structure takes up the first page: Until this thing happened, work had been without incident. There had been shrapnel, a few inquiring bombs, and some huge fires; but these were unremarkable and have since merged without identity into the neutral maze of fire and noise and water and night, without date and without hour, with neither time nor form, that lowers mistily at the back of my mind as a picture of the air-raid season. (FF 108)

This ‘neutral maze’ is rendered through hypotaxis into one that closes behind the fireman and the experiences, moving forward to leave no

52

Reading the Ruins

markers or shapes, and no temporal co-ordinates, until it can only be rendered as a seasonal impressionÂ€– and the reader is given shades of Keats by way of the naturalisation of warfare. The artful movement in the subsequent paragraphs opens a space between the character being depicted and his subsequent role as the narrator, and accentuates the question of what kind of retrospective view is framing the events. The conditionality of ‘I suppose’, with its implication of a past self whose behaviour must be presumed if not known, makes this vividly clear. But in the second page this waiting coiled around abstractions is broken, with the menacing bathos of ‘an unusual sound’. The sound is that of the wall tipping on a hinge so that it ‘hangs’ over the firemen. The six subsequent paragraphs that follow describe and expand on that ‘second’ as the narrator, caught in utter vulnerability, becomes an extrasensory recording instrument: Very suddenly a long rattling crack of bursting bricks and mortar perforated the moment. And then the upper half of that five-storey building heaved over towards us. It hung there, poised for a timeless second before rumbling down at us. I was thinking of nothing at all and then I was thinking of everything in the world. (FF 109)

Time as a subjective and wholly personal way of measuring the world is accentuated, making it into a transformative but bodily experience of duration: ‘new eyes opened at the sides of my head’; and this heightened awareness of the newly stretched temporal is conveyed to the reader through a variety of devices. He moves from a description of flames that ‘seemed to bulge from the black frame-work of the buildings window spaces’, with the italics enacting the movement and spectacle, to the realisation that the only coloursÂ€– apart from black and whiteÂ€– available in the scene ‘vermillion … red … orange-red’ (FF 110) all emanate from the flames upon which this depiction relies. With the sound of the cracking wall the moment is now ‘perforated’Â€– as the body of the narrator will (seemingly inevitably) be perforatedÂ€– but the text exists between such ruptures. Varieties of temporal disruption reoccur across Sansom’s wartime Â� oeuvre. In ‘The Witnesses’ time again becomes extended as punishment, while the process of its perception is being continually questioned: ‘[a] moment’s fear transformed into a smile of hatred only by a fireman’s brain, the unreliable agent that had informed us, the witnesses’ his eyes (FF 86). In ‘Building Alive’ the punctured space in the temporal continued existence becomes, again, the place of the story: ‘Our destination lay within the dust. The fly-bomb had blasted a pause within the pause of Sunday morning.’18

A metropolis aflame

53

Yet versions of Sansom’s distorted time, though caused by his nightly encounters with a transformed city, extend far beyond the immediate depictions of fire and war. ‘The Long Sheet’, another of his early stories, is fascinating in two distinct but ultimately interlocking ways. It represents the other strand of his wartime writing, barely studied or even acknowledged: the short story as fable or cautionary tale. This form or subgenre makes up at least half of his completed works, and they actÂ€– in his first three collectionsÂ€– to balance the ‘fireman’ stories almost exactly. They range in settings from garden sheds to gasometers, from nineteenthÂ�century Austro-Hungary to worlds that are as allegorical as possible. It is within this last category that ‘The Long Sheet’ (FF 86–94) falls. In an unnamed but totalitarian state groups of people are imprisoned, and then tortured, by being set a task of a modern Sisyphus: to wring dry a long, drenched sheet of fabric that is fed into their cells. Sansom appears initially here to construct a world in diametric opposition to those found in his stories of fire. The claustrophobia engendered is that of moisture and rust, vapour and drips; close proximity in a clammy miasma with shades of both garrison and gaoler. But the effect of elemental encounter acts, as it does with flame, to confuse or destroy any normal time progression. Initially the task laid out before the captives, and reader, is knowable and measurable: ‘it must be wrung as dry as a bone. This, the warders concluded, might take a long time. It might even take months of hard work’ (FF 88). The sheet is continually resoaked through jets of steam, ‘saturated birds’ that are released into the cells/roomsÂ€ – and occasional hose blasts. At every point the time span envisaged through the different methods they use in squeezing, wringing, and slapping water from the sheet is extended or elongated. The knowable becomes reduced to action; and a different kind of time starts to govern the various captives in their differing cells, all of whom structure their actions quite differently: some are methodical and some impressionistic. In room three the couples and the ‘young serbian [sic] grocer’19 divide their time and ‘commute’ between ‘the steel sleeping quarter’ to ‘the office (the long sheet)’ (FF 89). A l l e g or y a n d ph y s ic a l i t y How to conceptualise time under changed conditions, and conditions which apparently did not allow for naturalistic models, was a problem that fuelled much of Sansom’s allegorical writing. He saw this work himself in a Kafkaesque mode, orÂ€– more positively, one influenced by nonÂ�Christian belief systems that needed time to be perceived differently, as

54

Reading the Ruins

shown in an author’s note to an anthology. His own stories are ‘attempts, in allegory, to express in Western terms certain buddhist philosophies that have inspired him’.20 However the story featured in this volume shows how far those stories that are ostensibly far from fire and firemen nevertheless return there compulsively. ‘From the Water Junction’, which follows three orphans of the subterranean rivers and sewers, is muddily aquatic when not hallucinatory. Yet such hallucinatory moments as there are lead back to the visions (and time-splintering revisions of vision) of the firemen: ‘just as the hands have touched him, perhaps even beforeÂ€– for this was a slow minute of imperceptible fractionsÂ€– a new thought has fused in his mind’.21 The thought then boils and bursts until it becomes acceptance and fatalism, leading to the end where they, too, are framed as surely as if a window had fallen around and enclosed them: ‘then the journey back through the sewer. But this time not a long journeyÂ€– instead a swift one, a sure journey, until once more they reach the Â�water-junction and the work without which they can never be able even to begin their search for a contentment they may never find’.22 The ending of ‘The Long Sheet’ typifies such fatalistic hopelessness framed as certainty and an explanation for the irrationalities of life. When the prisoners of room 1 have wrung their section of the sheet dry and apply to be freed, the time logic of punishment is reset by the guards with capricious casualness; as they give gnomic philosophical justifications, they hose down the sheet until it is drenched. Only an ‘attitude of the spirit’, not a quantifiable human duration, will bring freedom. The transformation wrought by fire on an understanding of time subsequently moves in Sansom’s work through many other materials. But it is not only time that is distorted in Sansom’s stories; space becomes a site for transformation too, as all knowable and quantifiable parametersÂ€– up and down, near and farÂ€– move to become replaced in a new world which obeys only the logic of the flames. One of Sansom’s little known stories, ‘Journey into Smoke’ (1944), bears this out. In it the firemen attempt to gain access to the heart or ‘seat’ of the fire, a quest repeated in ‘Fireman Flower’. But here the actual achievements when such a core is reached are inconsequential compared to the tribulations of the trek through smoke and water. From the first paragraph the lighting effects caused by fire baffle any attempt at depth perception; while later, amid the twisting and sumplike underground, it is misrecognitionÂ€– of objects, scales and peopleÂ€– which becomes the norm. For example, in the flooded passages of a building, ‘as I ploughed forward through the water I saw that now the surface was littered with small floating shapes of paper,

A metropolis aflame

55

hundreds of them, scattering the water like a countless flock of inch-long ducks. I shuddered when I understood the surreal truthÂ€– they were toffee papers, stilly floating, unutterably forlorn.’23 Moreover, all anchored surroundings exist rather as stage properties, starting positions that will be ripped asunder or shown to be absurdly pliable: ‘[t]he wall, like a rubber wall in a Disney cartoon, sprang out at my eyes, bulging round, then snapped back into its flat self. This happened, distinctly.’24 But the threat that fire brings means that menace is always a concomitant part of any pleasure in seeing the world as continually various. For the characters even to admit to this has to be shrouded in extreme bodily angst: ‘Again I felt the stirrings of a rebellious vertigo’.25 Or, in one of his stories in the fabula mode, this fear is made manifest at the very first encounter from the very title ‘The Maze’ (FF 60–81), and is confirmed when the verbose topiarist attempts to describe the founding father of the labyrinth’s desire to map the internal on to the external, while carrying the menace between body and shrubbery: ‘Once he almost felt a tremor of movement within the bright darkness that lay within his skull. He nearly imagined the point, the dark point, where part of his brain actually touched the interior bone of his skull’ (FF 69). The salient fact of fire-fighting was that all inflammatoryÂ€– and most resistantÂ€– materials had the potential to be transformed in the most violent way, a trope that fuels ‘In the Morning’ (1944). Here the mutability of time is layered on to that of the substance the fireman is supposed to be guarding: ‘“And that”, said the officer, pointing to a squat brick tower, shaped like a Martello tower, that threw its shadow over them from only a few yards away, “is full of petrol”.’26 The fireman’s mind throughout the hours of the watch inverts categories and repositions them spatiallyÂ€– ‘Thus night and fire were precisely enclosed within this concrete compartment’27Â€– and all possible conclusions to the night are held as possibilities, all plausible and all developed: ‘[the fire might] go flapping its sheet-tongue through the side window against the brick petrol tank, piercing the brick with its million hot needles, baking the petrol to flashpoint’.28 But then again it might not. The thanatos-inflected desire that has been read into this story by Adam Piette is given ample weight, for example where a teleology of destruction appears to be attractive and so predominant: ‘What will they feel, thought Eliot, when the tank explodes? That isÂ€– he corrected quickly his perversely wishful thoughtÂ€ – if the tank explodes?’29 But this mutability is then embedded in a greater one, and framed in one greater still: ‘External changes of mind and the cloud shadowing the world had not in the first slow seconds yet asserted themselves; even after

56

Reading the Ruins

four years, life in terms of war was still artificial, an unwanted fabric of duties and new experiences superimposed upon an older, more real way of living: a relentless casing over but no admixture.’30 Wartime is itself mutable, and within it there can be no certainties or teleological framings which allow terms such as ‘end’ or ‘duration’ to be any more than hopes. The framing of such questions, or rather their reframing in terms of the spatial, in Sansom, is an admission of this. But there is also the attentiveness towards the materiality of spaces that could be, and were, transformed with sudden and utter violence. At the close of ‘The Wall’ both the story and characters within it are ‘framed’; but in doing so Sansom both offers artifice and contingency, layering concern with mutable time on to that of mutable space. The irony of the ending, and of the narrator’s survival, is that it occurs and can be reported due to contingency in extremis: one of the much stared at windows of the building, ‘ten rows of windows to each floor, making forty windows in all … the blazing windows stood to attention in strict formation’, had fallen so to leave him physically unharmedÂ€– framing him and the narrative. The temporal second has been shut back into a continuum, the body into a frame, and life can proceed beyond the casing of the story: ‘Lofty, away by the pump, was killed. Len, Verno and myself they dug out. There was very little brick on top of us. We had been lucky. We had been framed by one of those symmetrical, oblong window spaces’ (FF 111). B odi e s, va r ious Despite its continual subjection to such disorientating flux, both temÂ� poral and spatial, the body remained key to the surviving forms of knowing that are encoded into Sansom’s stories. But the bodies that are present in all the stories are ones defined by almost continual surprise, the shock of comprehending what stimuli they receive. So in ‘Journey into Smoke’ the strange scenes begin with the body itself being transformedÂ€ – and alienated from that of which it should be a part. On rummaging in a flooded basement he finds an abject form of alienation from the body. ‘They were two new hands that had by chance nestled into the cuffs of my uniform. They seemed to be wearing skin-tight red rubber gloves that glistened wetly, like the gloves of a surgeon, like the oiled body of a camera nude.’31 The analogies take the reader, and the protagonist, away from the scene, but they fail to give any causal logic; instead this is just the way his hands now are defined in the chaos of the burning buildingsÂ€– and the photographic or cinematicÂ€– ‘camera nude’Â€– offers the only hope for

A metropolis aflame

57

narrative stabilisation. In ‘Saturation Point’ (1942), a fable concerned with the reception and ingestion of images of a ruined town (FF 122–6), the possibility of absorbing the scenes projected in front of the protagonist require the a priori use of the cinematic as a template for describing the corporeal: ‘[t]he cinema of the mind! An imaginary picture is projected on that indefinite screen flanked, but never confined, by pillars of flashed bone and the alert muscles of a frown’ (FF 122). In ‘The Wall’ a variant of this projecting on to consciousness occurs as the moment the building falls: ‘Even the speed of the shutter which closed the photograph on my mind was powerless to exclude this motion from a deeper consciousness’ (FF 111). Then, before the information can be absorbed or assembled: The last resistance of bricks and mortar at the pivot point cracked off like automatic gunfire. The violent sound both deafened us and brought us to our senses. We dropped the hose and crouched. Afterwards Verno said I knelt slowly on one knee with bowed head, like a man about to be knighted. Well, I got my knighting. There was an incredible noiseÂ€– a thunderclap condensed into the space of an eardrumÂ€– and then the bricks and the mortar came tearing and burning into the flesh of my face. (FF 111)

The alliterative scream of pain here serves to anchor all sensation on toÂ€– or intoÂ€– the body. The compressions of the thunderclap as eardrum rupture feeds into the verbs of ingress and terror that complete the paragraph. Elizabeth Bowen touches upon this in her introduction to Sansom, as she reads it in terms of how the embedding is then, in turn, forced upon the reader: To have knowledge of, to be able to call up into what in the story is in actuality, to be able not merely to convey to the reader but impose on him (almost, to inflict on him) smells, tastes, sounds rendered complex or curious by acoustics or echoes, differences (as though under the touch) of surfaces, gradations of light and its watery running off into shadowÂ€– this was essential to the writer of these Sansom stories.32

Apart from compiling a phenomenology of apprehension, Bowen’s formulation trips around a divergence between a putative ‘author’ and ‘these Sansom stories’. It is a form of acknowledgement; for the elision of the author with the protagonist is at some points so extreme that part of the critical function is to reintroduce some salutary space, and to acknowledge the artifice that the author has constructed. Such artifice is visible through the problems of bodily perception being rendered in languageÂ€– such as here at the climax of ‘The Wall’: ‘The second was timeless. I had leisure to remark on many things. For instance, that an iron derrick,

58

Reading the Ruins

slightly to the left, would not hit me. The derrick stuck out from the building and I could feel its sharpness and hardness as if I had run my body intimately over its contour’ (FF 111). The ironic apotheosis of this tendency probably occurs in Sansom’s story that makes vertigo a phenomenological, near religious, experience: ‘The Vertical Ladder’ (1947). A group of bored children dare one another to climb the frail external ladder that is positioned as part of an expandable gasometer. After the description of the climb up the side of the metal cliff, and after the continual reports of differing bodily sensations in toes and fingers have been delineated, the boyÂ€– FleggÂ€– gets to the ‘top’. But it is not the top and he is now stuck before an unbridgeable gap. His reaction is not phlegmatic: ‘Flegg, clutching his body close to the rust, made small weeping sounds through his mouth’.33 The seemingly obvious factÂ€– that he is using his mouth to express fear and pass commentary on the sceneÂ€– needs to be written in overtly here since the expectation, fostered by the preceding pages, is that any commentary comes in knee pressure reduction, or the tracking of cramps through muscles. In Sansom’s postwar novel The Body (1949) the manic, quick-shelving nature of jealousy, triggered by another’s voyeuristic glance, renders the mild-mannered protagonist Henry Bishop compulsively and obsessively envious of any contact that ginger-moustached Charley Diver might have with his wife. The novel proceeds to entertain a sensual awareness of what is being lost through the overinterpretation of minutiae, and the self-torture that comes in its wake. The domestication of the idea of being ‘ruined’, of certainties ‘collapsing’ and having a world ‘turned upside down’ comes in the phrases of literal disorientation becomingÂ€ – merelyÂ€– metaphorical.34 Bowen, among others, captures how this disappointment and diminuendo became the leitmotif for Sansom’s work, but also for his themes: ‘William Sansom has moved from fireman stories and Kafka allegory to the study of the upper or lower suburban rock pool’.35 How far all of Sansom’s postwar work is haunted by the loss of the fireman as explorer-writer, a liminal and perceptive truth-teller, qualified and verified through his own inarticulacy and bewilderment, can be calibrated through the actual position of firemen in the postwar storiesÂ€– and how they are denoted, and subsequently demoted. In ‘Cat up a Tree’ (1945) the sight of a seemingly familiar figure now reduced to the useful banalÂ� ities of peacetime rescueÂ€– sans heroic or questing statusÂ€– brings a search for categories from some of those gathered around the feline-in-peril. But their decisionÂ€– and derisionÂ€– is final: ‘Gentleman? He was no gentleman, he was a fireman.’36

A metropolis aflame

59

L ou i s M acN e ic e a n d c om pl ic i t y O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy and image of ourselves, Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear, When you were looting shops in elemental joy And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire, Echo your thoughts in ours? ‘Destroy! Destroy!’37

The potency of MacNeice’s blaze-enraptured poem par excellence, ‘Brother Fire’, rising to a searing insight in its last stanza given above, has not diminished with time. It is still nowÂ€– as it was for Adam PietteÂ€– a locus classicus of Blitz writing.38 Yet the use Piette makes of MacNeice, as a departure point for a virtuoso mix of analysis and moral censure, means that the complexities of the differing parts of ‘Brother Fire’ and its place among MacNeice’s other works of the period have been obscuredÂ€– as have the ways in which it is both revelatory and atypical of a strand of ‘firewriting’. It is an important poem because it is alertly ambivalent: about form, about powers of description and, ultimately, about the problem of ascribing meaning to an elemental force. But it is perhaps most Â�important because of another kind of poised ambivalence; of welcoming ‘brother fire’ as both ‘enemy and image of ourselves’. It is also not a poem of the Blitz, being composed later and in retrospect. For while anthologised as typifying MacNeice’s complex political and aesthetic response to aerial attack, it represents instead a summation or a display of a hard-won dialectical posÂ�ition that had been constructed through experiences lived and poems composed. Questions of the reception of ‘Brother Fire’ are moreover bound together with the resultant political or aesthetic valence that such a welcome might meanÂ€– and where they might take the writer and the reader. Furthermore, MacNeice’s rapt encounters with the fire-storm in his poetry, prose and journalism typify a strand of British wartime writing; a fascination that sees hope in the flames despiteÂ€– or even because ofÂ€– destruction, and indeed wishes to find a language of personification for devastation, summoning out of incendiary bombs and their resultant conflagrations a interlocutor who could assist in the diagnosis of the sick civilisation of the 1930s while putting a fiery end to it. T rol l s i n t h e s mok e Two earlier poems of MacNeice’s that started to create art from applying or gifting agency to fire are ‘The Trolls’ and ‘Troll’s Courtship’. Here,

60

Reading the Ruins

with differing structures and tones, the destruction of London through fire-bombs and blast assumes a chthonic force or shapeÂ€ – but here, too, it is transmogrified into recognisable and threatening humanoid figures. ‘The Trolls’ comes with a subtitle that gives temporality and locale (‘written after an air-raid, April 1941’), but it also positions the act of writing as aftermath: a form of response that allows retrospect to construct meaning. These trolls are hybrid lumbering forms, compacted entities composed of bomber bomb and fire, who ‘trundle’ the sky and ‘ramble and rumble over the rooftops, stumble and shamble from pile to pillar’ (Sp 15) to bring a bleakly italicised refrain: ‘Pretty Polly won’t die yet,/ Oh, won’t she?’ But they also represent the limits of such an act of personification; fire cannot be an elemental force whose duration can escape from the specifics of a raid and a blaze. Their demotic slobber and trundle has to come to an end, and pathos then results in the (over)active verbs that attempt to Â�constrain fire into a form: ‘gurgling … tramping … fumbling … mumbling … hulking’ (Sp 15–16). The uneven lineation and sprawling syntax of the numbered sections of ‘The Trolls’ seem then to be moving into a synoptic view, but the various abstractionsÂ€– capitalised ‘Time’, cliché-hollowed phraseology ‘Death has the look of Finality’, and alliterative frenzy ‘No good gods’Â€– make the singularity of an encounter with this fire-form into something full of frenzied fear, but far less redolent and meaningful. A similar dispersal into nullility is enacted in ‘Troll’s Courtship’. This extends the demonification of aerial attack into something corporeal but clumsy, malevolent but primarily stupid: ‘in a smoking and tinkling dawn with fires and broken glass / I am a lonely Troll’ (Sp 17). The capitalisation makes even more plaintive the lack of an organising force beyond the conceit. Indeed the trolls, like Brother Fire, are ultimately less interesting as forms conjured from flames than as interlocutors for those around them; those who, as these poems’ reflexivity becomes more visible, question and demand what might be the meaning of their presence in the city. In ‘The Trolls’ the ‘we’ that predominates and holds the poem, emerges from the questioning to be united into a formal response: ‘This then is our answer’. Against such rejection and defiance, the embrace of Brother Fire as fraternal seems even more fascinating; he would appear as malign and brutal in the first two stanzasÂ€– with his ‘slaver and crunch’Â€– yet he becomes a ‘delicate walker’ alongside the thug antics of the trolls, and he is thus worthy of his theorist title; he provokes a dialectic within his questioner as well as with him. The reason he does so is intensely political. Variants of MacNeice’s movement, to graft agency on to fire and then to draw political conclusions, are found across a number of writers, some whom

A metropolis aflame

61

later recanted their thoughts and some who did not. Stephen Spender’s ‘Destruction and Resurrection’ (1941), a five-page long and rather clankingly unfocused poem of post-Blitz phoenix tropes, takes also a measure of pleasure in auditing with wonder this destructive force: How new you are. And real! Who, naked, live, or collapse, dead, In the sensitivized city! The blushing blistered buildings feel Scorching blood lick them red With your new born humanity.

The complications of trying to praise flames while, as Spender was, being professionally engaged in trying to put them out provoked the question how such thoughts were thinkable and writable. Yet, however implausibly, this poem was included in Fire and Water: An Anthology by Members of the NFS (the National Fire Service).39 In his poem Spender allows the imperatives to pile upÂ€– ‘Break locks! Burn Fire!’40Â€– to a specific ideological end. The arguments are channelled towards a view of man and society as both initially opposed to the conflagration, but also guilty and deserving of it: ‘Burst open with vermillion the packed night / of money, in the silent city!’,41 and ‘Yesterday you built those towers / of your money making / in the city of bought doom’.42 Against such a force the attempts by the close to describe the fire as merely a ‘burning image of self’ seem doomed to fail, as do the pieties of what could now be born phoenix-like: ‘You who made this, O, be its opposite’.43 The vocative and plaintive hopelessness contrasts with the actuality of remorseless and compelling consummation as the fire, within the poem as within the city, drives back any vantage point of stasis or reflection: a purgative but dumb flame. When trying to weave together the strands of his wartime life into narrative form ten years later Spender recoiled from the certainties expressed in the poem, but the language of purgative change emerged again to counterbalance the sentiments: The leading personalities [fire-fighters] were those who had been longest at the station, for legends of their actions in fires had grown around them. Probably there is some foundation in reality for the many metaphors about fire: ‘being proved by fire’, ‘tests of fire’, etc. For these men who had been through the worst of the Blitz seemed to have been purged in some way, and reborn into the camaraderie of the sub-station.44

The knowable as a quality feuds with the suspected in this paragraph; there are actual, demi-theatrical ‘leading’, personalities who will then be

62

Reading the Ruins

described at length in minute physical detail. But what the effects of fire might have been upon them remains conjectural and uncertain, framed by the ‘probably’ that introduces the metaphors, then held at increasingly more tangential length by the ‘seemed’ and ‘some way’. The purgative effect of such a ‘dialectian’Â€– in MacNeice’s formulationÂ€– as fire means something very different to the onlookers and to those who have been exposed to it. The collective ‘our’ in ‘Brother Fire’ is sufficiently amorphÂ� ous to be able to offer up ‘bones’ and minds while still being able to persist in the discussion. Ultimately the figure of Brother Fire is a sounding board or even mouthpiece for the unspoken thoughts of the poet. For the destruction that fire causes is unvoiced, merely a cacophony of Â�incinerationÂ€– but the words that close the poem are an ‘echo’ originating from the poet: ‘Destroy! Destroy!’ For the pleasure in destruction requires the glimpse of a beauty that is itself ‘suckled on sparks’Â€– and one that has itself a history. A e s t h e t ics of de s t ruc t ion The complex and queasy aesthetic pleasures in contemplating vistas of destructionÂ€– be they ancient or frighteningly newÂ€– are a staple question of various theories of the ruin; with the ‘ruin-gazer’ complicating templates of the picturesque with his willed teleologies of sublime destruction.45 But fire offers an even more strange and exacting test: what sort of detachment is necessary to aestheticise the actual moment of destructionÂ€– and the agent carrying out such work? Questions of taking aesthetic pleasure in fire are another part of the knot elegantly tied by MacNeice in ‘Brother Fire’. What is so intriguing is that the dissembling overtness with which it is displayed in that poem has, itself, a history. In both reports at the time,46 and then later in The Strings are False, his playfully deceptive autobiography, MacNeice reports on the bombing of Barcelona in December 1938Â€– and on his own observations of his reactions. The port district is first described in terms of abjection; it is a place of ‘stinking and rubbled desolation’ with ‘the old wallpaper showing indecently’. Ultimately it had ‘the fascination of obscenity, of chalky dog-dung on a wharf, of old dried bandages, of bones’.47 But this scene is replaced, after the bombing raid, with a very different kind of flânerie amid the bloodstains: ‘a few Sunday morning strollers were standing, quizzical connoisseurs, looking at the dirty brown stains’.48 This phrase is immediately lost amid more descriptions of traversing a starving and blockaded city, but it emerges again in his prose of 1941Â€– prose that attempts to acknowledge both the liberatory

A metropolis aflame

63

implications and aesthetic pleasures of fire-bombing, and does so through a search for the humanoid flames, a brother fire. MacNeice wrote many more prose pieces than poetry throughout the early years of the war, but his reports and broadcasts acted as rehearsals for the forms of complicity displayed in the poetry: excitement in torment, aesthetic pleasure in debris.49 One of the most significant articles was ‘The morning after the blitz’ that MacNeice was commissioned to write for Picture Post: this was to illustrate a photo story concerning the endurance of London through the crescendo of bombing in the spring of 1941.50 The night he focused on was ‘The Wednesday’ (16 April) and its aftermath, an especially destructive and wide-ranging attack as the Luftwaffe had managed to start fires throughout the centre of London and came close to overwhelming the civil defence and fire services: ‘the night is remembered for its general ferocity’.51 In his report, a travelogue through burning streets, MacNeice pieces together reactions and counterpoints his own. But the particular quality of aesthetic pleasure for an observer is there, as it had been in MacNeice’s writings from Spain, and again it is externalisedÂ€– at least to start with. Even the term ‘connoisseur’ is used again in the description: ‘[m]y neighbour was standing on his doorstep smoking his pipe and looking down the hill with a connoisseur’s detachment; there was a fire down there, blowing like washing in the wind with a drunken flamboyance’.52 The fire has a character; the neighbour has enough experience of fires to be a connoisseurÂ€– but the author self-elides himself out of the narrative. But not for long. After meeting friends (bombed out, clad only in dressing gowns) he begins to make evaluations, initially through their ventriloquised voices, before shifting to his own: ‘“In the old days,” one of them said contemplatively, “you’d have gone anywhere to watch a good fire.” There were half a dozen fires to be seen in the course of our walk. Every variety of fire.’53 Indeed, having catalogued them, but not yet ascribed identities to them, the beginnings of an aestheticising mode can be glimpsed: ‘the shifting pattern of water and smoke and flame was as subtle as the subtlest of Impressionist paintings’. In this article, and others he published in America, the tentative movement towards an appreciation of the aesthetic is part of the argument of the piece itself; it is the author’s self-revelation comparable to (or a precursor of) the recognition of ‘Brother Fire’ as a comrade. This is strongest in a particularly climactic passage: All these shattered shops and blazing stores, this cataract of broken glass, this holocaust of hall-marked and dog-eared propertyÂ€– there was a voice inside me which (ignoring all the suffering and wastage involved) kept saying, as I watched a building burning or demolished: ‘Let her go up!’ or ‘let her come down! Let

64

Reading the Ruins

them all go. Write them all off. Stone walls do not a city make. Tear all the blotted old paper out of the book; there are more books in the mind than ever have got upon paper’.54

The voice of censorious reason is hereÂ€– but it is trapped within parenthesesÂ€– and no match for the ecstatic listing of the rationale for destruction. The hyphenated compounds reduced marks of ownership to those of wear, and the desire to turn over a metaphorical new page seems to offer escape from a language of the ledger book or audit, given its own finale with ‘write them off’. Analogous glimpses, which also include the parenthetical embedding of a moral judgement, can be seen in MacNeice’s articles for transatlantic and demi-propagandistic publication in the US magazine Common Sense, to where he contributed a ‘London Letter’ over five issues throughout 1941.55 Such knowledge can be displayed with another form of parenthetical aside, this time self-disarming, which is embedded for a specifically American audience: I have noticed myself that to walk along a great shopping street (imagine something like Madison Avenue) on the morning after a Blitz, far from being depressing is almost exhilarating (this may shock you but many people share my experience) … All the same I know we should ask ourselves every so often whether, living in these conditions, we are still seeing straight. I find that I vacillate as to the answer; sometimes I say to myself, ‘This is mere chaos, it makes no sense’, and at the other times I think ‘Before I saw war-torn London I must have been spiritually colour blind.’56

Or it can become more stridently direct, as shown here in his contribution to the quasi-diary section in Penguin New Writing, ‘How We Live Now’: But I am glad to be back in England and, in particular, in London. Because London since the Blitz has become more comprehensible. Because this great dirty slovenly sprawling city is a visible and tangible symbol of freedom; it has not been centralised, organised, rationalised, dehumanised into just a streamlined ad for the cult of the state.57

Here the signs of the aesthetic and political reactions to fire-bombing merge to make an individualistic messageÂ€– and to offer a cityscape capable of being ‘read’ for defiance and continued resistance, as indeed it is at the close of his Picture Post piece: ‘[b]ut the population, having got some sleep, was very much back on its feet … and the ruins of the day before yesterday had alreadyÂ€– in the way ruins doÂ€– settled themselves into the landscape, some with the inconsequence of rubbish heaps and some with the dignity of very ancient monuments’.58 Actions become scenery; and the contingency of form in aftermath allows both shades

A metropolis aflame

65

of war artist topographies and the rubbish collector. But across its seven pages the Picture Post article allowed unease about pleasure in destructionÂ€– political and aestheticÂ€– to be expressed through modulations of tone, and through the complexity of the relationship between the photoÂ� graphs and the text itself. The obvious awe of crumbling masonry Â�segues to the pathos of recovery as individuals search for salvage, a scene which is itself then altered by a caption that reads such activities as signs of endurance and resilienceÂ€– he is ‘the man the Nazis are trying to rattle [… but] he calmly salvages what he can and starts afresh’.59 Questions of such aftermaths do, however, set Brother Fire and his acts in a rather different context, and this is most keenly shown in MacNeice’s professional work as a radio producer at the BBC. Among the programmes he worked on throughout 1941–2 was a series entitled ‘The Stones Cry Out’. Each fifteen-minute episode would take an individual ruined building and, through describing its damage, gift it with vocal agency; thus MacNeice allowed an answer, of sorts, to overidentification with the symbol of the flames as the only protagonist. While the programmes apparently typify more conventional strains of mourning and remembrance, they actually formed an intellectually satisfying answer and imaginative response, a way of conceiving how the interlocutor for fire might actually be another apparently inanimate substance or structure.60 So ‘Brother Fire’ is part of a family (of works), and has a lineage; the poem does not just represent an immediate response to destruction but is itself part of a dialectic: between poet and subject; between aestheticising and acknowledging pain. H e n r y G r e e n: f i r e a n d t h e l i m i t s of de sc r i p t ion Awareness of unpublished, unfinished or unwritten works can taunt and tantalise, offering glimpses into literary histories of the might have been: ‘[t]he title of this book will be London and Fire 1939–45 by Henry Green’.61 So ends the outline for Green’s unfinished synoptic novel covering the entire war, of which only the plan and a fragmentary first section were written or at least survive. But despite their synecdochal melancholia, showing what the greater whole would have been, this section and the synopsis are fascinatingÂ€– especially when aligned with what Green did publish during the war. For they allow a reading that places this most captivating and infuriating modernist within not only a broad category of Second World War writing, but also among writers whose books are defined by, and owe much to, fire. In the previous chapter of this book the significance of Green’s pre-war novel set on the cusp of attack,

66

Reading the Ruins

Party Going, was traced in terms of its treatment of threat and of narrative Â�inaction, and its structure of diffused proleptic anxiety was contrasted with other novels of the ‘long 1939’. Questions of both actual and narrative paranoia also shape the prose form in his novel of firemen and Â�storytelling, Caught (1943). The recent biography of Green has shown how the Second World War proved a time of fluid and fluent literary productivity for him. For despite service as a volunteer in the Auxiliary Fire Service and later, after the individual brigades were nationalised, the National Fire Service, the years 1939–45 encompassed the publication and composition of short stories, two novels and the completion of a memoir.62 Yet the dangers of biographically based modes of approach would seem a point of particular difficulty for the publicity-phobic and self-effacing Green.63 The process of rehistoricising the conditions that Green wrote inÂ€ – and depictedÂ€ – might however alter both how the wartime work is seen and how it is contextualised. A range of critical approaches have usefully and astutely sensed his different variations on obliqueness as a mode: one suited for both writing and for frustrating easily heterodox unpackings and interpretations.64 Central to arguments concerning Green’s status is Caught, his intricately patterned and carefully overdetermined novel of fire station life and psychosis.65 My reading will examine that novel, and some of his short stories, to show how and why an elemental forceÂ€– fireÂ€– might be relevant to an understanding of how modernism equipped and allowed recursive narrative forms to deal with the city at war, and a city that was being transformed through bombing. F r a m i ng f i r e Signs of how fire, as a subject for storytelling, could be reframed through intricate iterations, or trapped in a mise en abyme set of other stories, come in one of the source materials for Caught, the short story ‘The Old Lady’ (1943). After being rejected by John Lehmann for Penguin New Writing this waited unpublished until it was included in the posthumous collection Surviving. It opens with the bland declamation of the bookworm fireman: ‘I had been reading The Arabian Nights at the fire station’ (S 111), but, as a raid begins, it then continues into a description of the fire-fighting – seen through the prism of the stories that have just been laid aside. So the streets become ‘like the twin approaches to the Sultan’s palace’; a statue of a horse is ‘facing south to Mecca’ (S 112); and the rescue proceeds even though ‘the glare was wide enough to attract more bombers, as though summoned,

A metropolis aflame

67

such was the expanse of light, by a secret word to which they answered, “the creatures of King Nasr”’ (S 112). Yet as the fires are fought the equivalences between fiction and reality drop away and the scenes become more suggestively horrific. A smear of a prostitute’s lipstick becomes a ‘blotch of red’, pre-empting the body ‘dying in his blood by the corner of the statue’ (S 113). These episodes and sections are reused within Caught (C 94–6), but with the apparatus of the Arabian Nights exoticism torn off: the horse is now merely ‘facing south’, the bombers simply attracted by a burning gas main. So the experience is reframed, again as a story, but this time as an ironic contrast to the expectations and fears that Roe, the protagonist, has suffered during the Phoney War period. The fires that he has been waiting for emerge from one form of narrative confinement and are, instead, placed in another. Indeed fire is remarkable in Caught as an overt subject, a condition of possibility for the narrative. Yet it is also a profound and unsettling absence within it. The circumlocutions and orbits that allow a story to be about fireÂ€– in both the referential and positional senseÂ€– are also the modes by which the novel becomes about storytelling and the problem of representation. The two protagonists at the centre of the novel are Richard RoeÂ€– volunteer, middle class and near authorial presenceÂ€– and Pye, an insecure and paranoiac regular fireman. Their names together giving, as has been often noted, the Greek stemword for fire itself: pyro.66 In such a light the title itself then becomes an index of inflammability, with echoes of sexual desire and entrapment added to the combustible mix, and the artificial and claustrophobic life the firemen live while on watch (forty-eight hours on duty, twenty-four off) are filled with rituals and the vocabulary of firefighting. But how might actual fire matter in a book that is concerned with its absence until the very last pages? For this is a text that is resolute in its luxuriation in boredom, in details of administration, fire-fighting practiceÂ€– and, most importantly, gossip and sexual desire. The period of the war in which most of the action is set, up until the spring of 1940, merited the contemporary epithet ‘phoney’. Indeed, as Green later wrote in ‘Before the Great Fire,’ the conflagrations that had to be dealt with did not all come from bombs. Rather, some were created by the firemen themselves: ‘they are still allowed “wet canteens”, that is a basement room in which they can buy and drink beer’. But such canteens had a limited life: ‘[w]hen they get into too much difficulty with their figures of takings, it is traditional they should set fire to this room and then put out the flames themselves, after all records have been consumed’ (S 274).

68

Reading the Ruins

The pattern of playing with the potent term to depict non-threatening blazes holds true for Caught. Ironically, the first fire encountered is the bonfire burning harmlessly on the estate to which Roe’s son has been evacuated. The second is the central ‘hearth’ in the memory of his son’s abduction. The third is merely imaginaryÂ€– one, supposedly lit by a rescue squad, that had spread to a dustbin, but was actually ‘invented’ as part of a scam: a fire to justify firemenÂ€– ‘Such a thing is known as “the Fire Brigade mind”’ (C 43). This problem of absence or presence can be nuanced further: what relation does fireÂ€– in its mode of looming potentiality rather than actual presenceÂ€– as a subject have to Green’s idiosyncratic narrative form? To read Green in this light, as it were, of fire, and to think through what his war worksÂ€– novels, autobiography and short storiesÂ€– might owe to his role as a fireman and the material conditions in which he wrote them, is the subject for the next section of this chapter. For while the details and minutiae of a fireman’s activities clog and clutter the various pages, from hoists to folding ladders, and from uniform codes to punishments, the effect of fire qua fire on narrative is rather different. For in these wartime works the ‘tough yet affectionate questions’ that Green has posed throughout his oeuvre ‘about how novels are written, read, and written about’,67 are enthralled by an encounter with a subject matter that resists categorising. It can only be encountered in retrospect, as a story, or through the estranging layers of artifice. Dr e a di ng f orwa r d s The mutability of time, and the dependency on the retrospective as a mode, are the conditions for such layers of artifice. The disruptions of time within Green’s work of the 1930s, from the reworking of a near Steinian continuous present in Living (1929) to the sexualised disjuncture in Party Going (1939), now changes and takes on a rather different and death-charged significance. In ‘Before the Great Fire’ Green makes use of a phrase that could become totemic for considerations of late modernist perception and thanatos: ‘dreading forwards’ (S 261). Issues concerning the shapes of what that dread might encounter, and how far it had already been shaped in the dreading, could begin to explain the complications of narrative within Caught and the wartime short stories. For Caught is a novel of retrospect, but it moves and migrates between the pre-Blitz Phoney War period to the aftermath of the sustained bombing, as the narrative overleaps the Blitz itself; which itself is then framed, literally, through the frequent use of parenthesis in the attempts made by Roe

A metropolis aflame

69

to tell his sister-in-law Dy about what happened. But such shuttle-andÂ�return weaving between times does not account for all, or even most, of the dread that has been actively converted into disruption. To understand why ‘dreading forwards’ might be a way of knowing about fires that have not yet happened, it is necessary to unpick what kinds of anticipation Green might be using. An anticipatory moment is hidden deep within Caught, and it is one that reshapes the wonder at survival voiced or implicit among the firemen. For Roe compares the fires he has to fight with those he had been threatened with: ‘the lecture told how a gigantic death toll must follow the first raid, together with a great number of what were called conflagÂ� rations’ (C 68). Set alongside the opening to Green’s autobiography the status of now being among the ‘non-dead’ becomes sharply apposite: I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war which seems to be coming upon us now, and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking too much to pretend one had the chance to live.68

Another version of this autobiographical anticipatory dread, but now from a position of retrospect, comes in ‘Before the Great Fire’: ‘So I was alone in London that dreadful morning, forty-eight hours before war was declared … alone, frightened, sickened, sure of dying’.69 But it is in Caught that dread predominates as the condition of waiting; one that is both constant, submerged and yet telling on the form of the prose itself. Numerous examples could be given; this one accentuates the trope by actually utilising the very word: ‘light after light went darker than the night that was falling and which he dreaded. For twenty minutes at dusk the scene was his wife’s eyes, wet with tears he thought, her long lashes those black railings, everywhere wet, but, in the air, the menace of what was yet to be experienced, the beginning’ (C 34). The twists and alterations within these sentences, with the meanings pivoting round in zeugma-like ways, moving outwards from the personal to the whole city, means that the movement from the blackout dimming of lights to total mortal fear is accomplished in the process of readingÂ€– as well as being depicted in the writing. Allied to the coercion of the reader in such anticipatory dread is an aspect of the novel that validates it and bears out its relevance; while the reader may travel and experience fear with Roe, there areÂ€– it would appearÂ€ – good reasons to do so. For the kinds of omnipotence in the novel that are granted to the narratorial voice make the fears apparently

70

Reading the Ruins

justified, as some representative examples show: ‘How utterly harmless you are, thought Richard, sleepless, and how wrong he was’ (C 40); ‘Later on he carried out his promise. He was to regret it’ (C 45); ‘But in this he was wrong twice, both times’ (C 65); and ‘But he was wrong’ (C 104). Mengham tracks how this sets up a situation where the novel appears ‘to know more than the reader’,70 and imposes upon a reader a continually tantalising but deferred teleology of knowledge and explanation. This can be extended and reflect back upon the actions of the characters: the dread that they feel comes both in an expectation of violent deathÂ€– but also a desire to remake and alter their own potential storiesÂ€– if there is still time. The visit that Mary Howell, the cook and cleaner at the fire station, makes to Ted, her estranged son-in-law, is a good case in point. He has traduced her daughter, and a rising tide of anger slops about in the rehearsals Howell makes for the speech of denunciation that she plans to give upon arrival at his barracks: ‘[s]he pictured at the back of her eye the descent she was going to make on this camp the rotten good-for-nothing, lying ’ound her son-in-law hung out in’ (C 82). Her self-dramatisation involves imagining herself being accepted by the soldiers through curfew, amid the choirs and searchlights of the occasion, as merely an archetypal ‘Mother … like you have of your own’ (C 83). But it also relies both on its derivative, film-inspired staging, and how the actual language admits or obliquely accepts the levels of ambiguity latent in her speech. All the action takes place ‘at the back of her eye’, not in the mind’s eye or in the back of the mind, and so apparently care-worn and clichéd phrases are reinvented in terms of menace. But the trip Howell takes is importÂ� ant beyond the immediate dramatisation; it presages and gives a template for how fireÂ€– and dangerÂ€– will be encountered and recounted. For her actual confrontation is a mix of evasion and embarrassment, but on return to London the whole incident is refigured: ‘“Oh I told ’im, Arthur, told ’im proper … you lazy bastard,” I says, “that’s got no right to call yourself a man”’ (C 117). The whole episode captures both the delusion on the parts of the characters, but also the way in which, subsequently in the narrative, the self-delusion is naturalised and taken as an accepted fact. Mengham relates this to a phenomenon already known within the war: the remaking of private experience along the lines of pre-scripted public formsÂ€– be they news reports or film plots. The difficulty of authentically finding a language for experiences that did not conform to the arcs (and satisfactions) of plot and narrative could thus be ameliorated.71 The problem for Roe is his knowledge that such self-deceptions are merely strategies. The awareness of such mechanisms of translating or

A metropolis aflame

71

remaking the world into narrative form are both attractiveÂ€– and problematic. When, at the close of the book, he is sent to recuperate with Dy and his son in the country, the central absence throughout the narrative of the dreaded elementÂ€– fireÂ€– is explained in retrospect; but only through a spectacular failure of storytelling. Moreover, while film, as the cultural template for Mary Howell’s remaking of her own story, acted as an indicator of the difficulty for truthÂ€– and truth-telling, for Roe film, or indeed literature, is itself part of the problem: one’s imagination is so literary. What will go on up there tonight in London, every night, is more like a film, or that’s what it seems like at the time. Then afterwards, when you go over it, everything seems unreal … as you begin building again to describe to yourself some experience you’ve had. (C 175)

Such a problem with all ‘experience’ being inevitably altered when repeated, forced to conform to narrative techniques and knowable tropes, is accentuated with the attempts to describe any encounter with fire. Here, in the final sequence of the novel, the parentheses become a marker for bifurcation, bracketing off the story told and the story actually remembered: It was acres of timber storage alight about two hundred yards in front, out in the open, like a huge wood fire on a flat hearth, only a thousand times bigger. (It had not been like that at all. What he had seen was a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.) (C 181)

The inadequacy of providing anything akin to the experience itself when it is retold means that fire remains sanctified as ultimately unrepresentable. But it is also the compelling subject for such repeated attempts, for the failures at explanationÂ€ – and Roe’s final inchoate explosion of temper provides an index of this. For fire is both the element that the novel has arranged itself around, with the dread shuttling back and forth over it, but it is, ultimately, an experience that cannot be incorporated as another story or subject matter for a moral truth or analogy.72 T e l l i ng s t or i e s The scale of Caught allows this process to be elaborate and intricate, representing time and individual strands of narrative. In Green’s short stories fire is the problem of fire, both as a supposed subject for narrative but also as fundamentally as narratableÂ€– and thus without possible translation into conventional tropes. Flames are then present in a way that both

72

Reading the Ruins

brings focus and also gives rise to multiple elisions, which are, in their turn, consummated, compressed and curtailed. In ‘The Lull’ (1943),73 Green’s most complex wartime story, the overt problem of storytelling as an activity becomes foregrounded in the conditions for any attempt at narrative. Here some firemen, identified only by numbers,74 try to fill or organise their time in the ‘lull’Â€– that is temporally the time between the Blitz and the later raids and V-bomb attacks, but also the space or lacunae of meaningÂ€– given that meaning has been hitherto generated by action and fire. The seven apparently unconnected sections of the story, each given only a numerical designation, mix gossip, memories and anecdotes told around the fire station bar. No form predominates or acts as an index to understanding the others. But while the mix of different narrative forms acts itself as compensatory fillingÂ€– ‘they were seeking to justify the waiting life they lived at present, without fires’ (S 104)Â€– it also exposes the process of the construction of characters. All the sectionsÂ€– apart from the fifth, of which more laterÂ€ – are in idiomatic, specifically workingclass speech used by the full-time, professional firemen of the story; but they are accompanied by a knowing commentaryÂ€– a precursor to that in CaughtÂ€– which seeks to contextualise both the mode and the time. In the first section the discussion is around Sam Race, a character whoÂ€– as it only becomes clear at the endÂ€– has been invented as a composite figure for the amusement of the barman. The second section frames a story about an aunt who murders cats for pleasure; the third then offers an external view of the predicament: ‘These men were passing through a period which may be compared with the experience of changing fast trains. A traveller on the crowded platform cannot be said to command his destiny, who stands, agape, waiting for the next express. It is signalled, he knows it will be packed, it is down the line’ (S 104). The fourth section contains the retelling of a story of what once happened to other firemen on top of a roof. As the sixth fireman tells the story the demotic language of fear is both an attempt to convey the actionÂ€– but also part of the process of retelling, turning the experience of fire into a story: ‘“But we still ’aven’t come to the seat of the fire, we’re rumagin’ about, like, on top of that bloody roof when all of a sudden there’s a bloody blubbering noise up in the sky over’ead, yes, like a dog bloody ’owling in a bass voice, an coming down out of the moon though we couldn’t see nothink”’ (S 105). The story has been told before, it has already thus undergone the proÂ� cess of conversion, complete with polished phrases and timed pauses, into narrativeÂ€– and inchoate fear and terror has been replaced with analogy

A metropolis aflame

73

and metaphor. The actual, horrific threatÂ€– a deflating barrage balloonÂ€– is almost as disconsolate as the story. The success of this retelling is muted. The sixth fireman ends with what should be the punchline: ‘“Know what it was?”’ But the omniscient narrator fills in the lack of success: ‘Everyone in the room, bar the stranger, could have told him. They had heard the story often. And the stranger was not interested’ (S 106). After the interludes of a fireman as lover in a park (fifth section) and fireman as victim of crow attack where a bird stands in for a bomber (in the sixth), the story closes with a gesture towards the process of making narrative from chaos, and seeing in the fires of the Blitz a way of ordering storiesÂ€– not only as recollection but as ways to live. So this is the dialogue between two firemen that closes the seventh (and final) section of the story: The tenth man said to the eleventh: ‘I’m browned off Wal, completely.’ The eleventh answered: ‘You’re not the only one.’ ‘Wal, d’you think there’ll ever be another blitz?’ ‘Well, mate, if he doesn’t put one on soon we shall all be crackers.’ ‘You’re telling me.’ ‘And they are going insane, in every station, every day.’

(S 109)

What matters here is not only the illogicality of self-definition as a fireman in a world without fires, but also the opposite of ‘dreading forwards’; a hoping forwards, hoping that a narrativeÂ€– if not this oneÂ€– will offer content and conclusion, even if the content is more fires. The fires that avoided description in Caught are now summoned, given the alternative is delusional psychosis; and thus Green’s oeuvre while knowing much about fires also knows about wariness and artifice, the problems of description and the need for retelling. But questions of description, artifice and temporality had a corollary in poetryÂ€– as well as proseÂ€– that attempted to engage with fire. E l e g i ac p o ss i bi l i t i e s Making, with whatever difficulties, an elegy from ashes remains a potent symbol of aesthetic redemptionÂ€ – but why did the elegy, of all forms, become a way of responding to the city as conflagration? Throughout the 1930s the elegy grew in potency as a form of mediating between past horrors and future dreads.75 Indeed the question of what could be an elegyÂ€– and why such a loaded title might be usefulÂ€– was a potent one in interwar British writing. The immediate shadow of First World War slaughter renewed the elegy’s cultural currency for acts of individual and collective memory. But even by 1920, Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ is a way

74

Reading the Ruins

of mourning which seeks to destabilise the rationale that credited such loss with meaning: ‘For two gross of broken statues, / For a thousand battered books’.76 For some modernists a rediscovery of the term ‘elegy’ itself, a packaged compress of high art legacies and deathly encounters, was Â�usefulÂ€– and they tentatively allowed it to go on colonising. Virginia Woolf wrote on this very dilemma in her diary as she finished To the Lighthouse. ‘I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my book to supplant “novel”. A newÂ€– by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?’77 By the 1930s such questions of what might be an ‘elegy’ were additionally part of a literarycritical project; of whether modernism was itself an elegiac form. In his study of Eliot and others Stephen Spender cannot bring himself to wrench the term off its pious plinth, but it is his implicit coding for the chapters devoted to Eliot’s writing, as for Spender the notion of elegy affirms purpose of the shadow play in ‘pictures of decay’.78 Of the validity of memory in ‘Gerontion’, Spender notes: ‘It is written in the belief that the decline of civilisation is real, that history is, as it were, now senile.’79 Only in his much later work on modernism as a safely historicised cultural epoch does Spender actually give the term itself centrality, writing of The Waste Land: ‘there is an elegiac theme’.80 But against this inheritance the relevance or apositeness of the elegy came into sharper relief in the Second World War itself: ‘He [Barker] earned Scott’s [Frank Scott, a Montreal lawyer] bemused admiration by telling him Britain had a duty to capitulate to Germany in order to supply her poets with a new theme for elegies.’81 George Barker’s wartime comment on elegies, through his stylistic movements and bridging of various poetic factional realms, is a useful example of how the elegy provided organising structure for both personal and politÂ� ical thinking. Yet from ‘Elegiac stanzas’, the first work in Thirty Preliminary Poems (1933), through to the uncollected ‘Elegy on Tinned Meat’,82 Barker had already shown his fondness for the form, and had pushed his use of it far beyond any conventional pieties of graveside memorialisations. The most revealing aspect of his pre 1938–9 work within this form can be seen in his ‘Elegy Anticipating Death’ (1935). Here the protagonist, overwhelmed with apprehension and fear, remarkably manages to construct an elegy for himself out of his own inarticulacy. Indeed Barker provides a good case study for a progressive move by numerous poets towards a writing of elegies which were both proleptic as well as reflective; concerned with the deaths to come as well as those that had passed.83 Moreover he was also involved with one of the most influential translations of the late 1930s: of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. This work offered a template for the difficulty of acknowledging the expansiveness of future suffering, pain that would

A metropolis aflame

75

make past hurt incommensurate with grief to come. In early 1939 Julian Symons asked Barker to review this new edition for Twentieth-Century Verse. The review was never published, but Barker extended it into an article Â� while in America84Â€– and responded to the poems with his own poem simply entitled ‘Rilke’.85 The Hogarth Press edition of the Duino Elegies was prefaced by J. B. Leishmann and Stephen Spender’s extensive introduction. This historicised the sequence in relation to the First World War, but it also offered a succinct analysis of Rilke’s specific lyric use to modernism on the cusp of war: ‘Rilke’s problem was to find symbolic or what he called “external” equivalents for experiences that were becoming ever more inward and “incommunicable”, and which, when he tried to communicate them, were continually bringing him up against the limitations of language.’86 This search for a sufficient symbolic or ‘external’ force can be seen in Barker’s attempts throughout his later elegies, especially in Elegy on Spain (1939) which was considered in Chapter 1. But he also prefigures the wartime works of various poets who try, fail, and then consider their failure, to find such significant ‘equivalents’Â€– from ash and burnt debrisÂ€– that could serve as sincere and clear-eyed tools for mourning. E l e g i e s f rom f i r e When in the 1960s Robin Skelton edited his anthology Poetry of the Forties he included both writers deemed minor and seemingly major; those who had made their peace with the dominance of the ‘Movement’ aestheticÂ€– and those who had not. But, most interestingly, he chose to bookend the volume with two sections, one titled ‘1940’ and one ‘1950’. To anchor ‘1950’, and thereby implicitly crown and seal off the whole period, he chose James Kirkup’s ‘Elegy to a Dead God’.87 This piece of editorial mapping, while starkly brutal, is telling. It resites the elegy as a way of understanding the war decadeÂ€– under the sign of mourning . In doing so it places the elegiac mode, the lack of religious consolation and the concomitant overview as joint conditions of the aftermath. However, to write elegies in wartime, and to make mourning from temporary states that lack a narrative arc or political certainty, was a braver and more contingently artful act. It was also one which offered a formula for transforming the destructive element of fire from the bombsites into, once more, an interlocutor. To align together the wartime works of T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas under the sign of fire, and to argue for it as their common point of focus, could appear either counterintuitive, mythopoetically gauche, or wilfully deaf to nuance. Belonging to very different poetic traditions, utilising very

76

Reading the Ruins

different forms, and having jarringly different ideological aims for what poetry might (and might not) do, it seems strange to place them together; beyond merely noting their deracinated status and subsequent elective affinity with London. But beyond the contingency of geography and history there is a sound aesthetic reason for bringing their wartime works into a dialogue. For both Thomas and Eliot managed to produce poems during the aerial attacks on London that were overtly or implicitly elegies. They used the elegy as a form for corralling and aestheticising mourning appropriate to both individuals and cities. Moreover in their elegiac works of the 1940sÂ€ – ‘Little Gidding’ by Eliot, four various memorial poems by ThomasÂ€– each constructed a central core that requires taking both a spiritual structure from fire, and also a set of images from the debris, ash and aftermath. Such elegies refused to corral emotion for patriotic purposes: the pacifist and sometime conscientious objector Thomas went so far as to deny the idea of a national culture in response to conflictÂ€– ‘War can’t produce poetry, only poets can’.88 Eliot, for his part, positioned his work in terms of art-as-patriotism within a historical continuity rarefied away from the progressivist brutalism of the ‘Your BritainÂ€– Fight For It now’ posters. Comparison thus performs the valuable service of bringing the composition of these works back to temporal and physical specificityÂ€ – central London, 1940–2Â€– and also of elucidating the complex position of the elegy with the Second World War. Moreover, it shows how both rely upon a balancing act of forces, an avowedly materialist subject matter: the burnt traces in ash, charred timber and dust of the bombed city. At the same time in both poets there is the transformative desire for hope, one which resides in rhetorical intensity transforming a destructive force. The morality of the elegy became, in wartime, part of a wider question concerning the place of poetry at all. The search for war poets in the early days of 1938–45 has been well documented, as have the differing reasons for the ripostes that met such a callÂ€– which ranged from Keidrych Rhys’ embittered locating of them ‘under your nose’ to C. Day-Lewis’ caustic doggerel on the ‘logic of our times’ where the climactic hope would be to ‘defend the bad against the worse’.89 The survival of poetry in wartimeÂ€– and its survival through elegiesÂ€– mattered to Eliot. History is mediated and made sensually malleable in Four Quartets from the very opening, but history is also marked as being past and worthy of mourning. For the temporal balancing acts that open ‘Burnt Norton’, with regress, containment and abstraction are, while being precariously beautiful, also predicated upon understanding history as a process that both conditions selfhoodÂ€– and serves to sanctify loss. The span of the collected sequence

A metropolis aflame

77

is a product of their moments of composition in 1936–43, yet it ends with Four Quartets existing as a war poemÂ€– or rather one whose appreciation and reception is coloured and shaped by war. So to read ‘Little Gidding’, Eliot’s final quartet, as an elegy requires some assessment of both its place within the sequenceÂ€ – and also its status in its own right as a wartime poem. The forms of mourning and commemoration it proposes are also forms of acceptance; and its reliance upon the fire, an element that has been such a thematically complex presence throughout the sequence, means that the final settled enfolding must also hark back to what has been lost. But the elegiac tone of auditing the departed forces and individuals, affirming a Christian past while preparing for personal extinction, seems undeniable. Moreover, when ‘Little Gidding’ is placed amid the otherÂ€– albeit minor and journalisticÂ€– poems which Eliot was composing contemporaneously, the shared cultural programme of concern with the uses to which poetry could be put in wartime becomes apparent. The sonorous listing and reinscribing of suffering as worthy of memory, the wish to mourn but also to establish a context for mourning, is portrayed as a means of facilitating insight: ‘Where a man dies bravely / At one with his destiny, that soil is his. / Let his village remember’.90 Recent criticism has attempted to contextualise, if not integrate, ‘Little Gidding’ with the other poems Eliot was writing during the war, and out of this process the urges towards elegyÂ€– and also the questioning of its ideological valence and useÂ€– begin to be glimpsed.91 Against such continuing interest in Eliot, the relative position of Dylan Thomas in histories of twentieth-century poetry now looks precarious. His reputation has fluctuated with dizzying speed since his death and now is in need of significant reappraisal.92 The co-ordinates of Thomas’ wartime broadcasting at the BBC, and his work in film, complicate a narrative of poetic maturity and decline, as do his peripatetic travels between Wales and London. Yet Thomas’ engagement with the elegiac form brings into sharper relief the way in which such a form also includes, or at least negotiates with, its double: the anti-elegy, the poem that creates itself through a refusal to be elegiac or to give significance to mourning as a consolatory act.93 Central to this strain would be Thomas’ ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’.94 E nc ou n t e r s i n t h e f l a m e s An encounter, or strange meeting in a familiar city, is key to providing the conditions for mourning in both Thomas’ and Eliot’s work. For the

78

Reading the Ruins

material traces and rhetorical tropes needed for remembrance are channelled through the form of an unexpected convergence; a moment where the persona in the poem meets and engages with a phantasmagoric other, one who is an emissary of the flames, or one of its victims. In Eliot this occurs in the second section of ‘Little Gidding’, just as the perambulation of the fire-warden persona is brought to a stop. The interlocutorÂ€ – the figure who then unscrolls an audit of futility in lifeÂ€– is not, however, a character or victim per se. He is rather ‘one walking, loitering and hurried / As if blown towards me like the metal leaves’;95 the apparent contradiction of the figure’s movement being then refashioned into recognition ‘in the brown baked features / the eyes of a familiar compound ghost’. Then ‘that refining fire’, the resolution to the pain, and the suffering of belief and the failure of belief, becomes the solution, brought by the figure from the fire itself. Thomas’ encounters are with rather different emissaries of the deadÂ€ – for they come in the glimpses of actual bodies, made inescapable by titles such as these: ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’ and ‘Among those burned to death was a child aged a few hours’. The latter was the original manuscript title for the poem renamed ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’.96 What Thomas then does to take significance from the encounter is twofold, and can be seen in the sonnet ‘Among those Killed’, as the aged man is transformed through his death into a symbol whose bodyÂ€– rather than his speechÂ€– is taken as significant by Thomas: When the morning was waking over the war He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide, He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor. Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang. Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart. The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage. O keep his bones away from the common cart, The morning is flying on the wings of his age And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

(CPT 112)

The man is located at the opening both temporally and spatially in the alliterative and punning lines; with age and place subordinated to warÂ€– and then, at the end of the second line, to death. The body is then

A metropolis aflame

79

changed as it is understood. Each part rendered into a sign of transformative sufferingÂ€– ‘craters for eyes’ or ‘ambulance drawn by a wound’Â€– as the incantational patterns move away from the materiality of stone, floor and street more up towards a pantheistic heaven outside human time. The space that is dependent on the body of this nameless victim becomes a symbol and originator for a moment of celestial expansiveness: ‘a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand’. Such an individual being used, or understood, amid the chaos of war raises questions of the function of the dead: what ways of knowingÂ€– or feelingÂ€– can they be used to show? The body is gifted a tutelary function here by Thomas, as is the case in ‘Refusal to Mourn’ and ‘Deaths and Entrances’, and it is this role of guidance which brings Eliot’s ghostly interlocutorÂ€– with his harsh but potent listing of the ‘gifts reserved for age’Â€– into proximity, and perhaps comparative contention.97 As h a n d pa pe r When Mrs G. White opened the front door of her parent’s house in Upminster Essex, to get the milk, she found the porch covered by a thick layer of burnt paper. The sight of the charred bits came as something of a surprise; she couldn’t understand where they had come from … she picked up some of the rubbish and saw at once they were burnt pieces of office ledgersÂ€– and the only place that many account books were kept was the city of London.98

Throughout the Blitz the immediate effects of fire-bombs, and the conflagrations that they caused, were starkly and immediately obvious: the flames, the areas of destruction and changed cityscapes. Yet there were also indicators of such devastation miles from the immediate sites of attack. The most common indicators came either through sound or lightÂ€– ‘it was bright enough to read a newspaper by’Â€– the commonest markers of intensity.99 However the most extended impact was of the lasting physical presence of ash and dust. Blown high in the air on columns of heat drawn up by convection currents, they floated to earth and acted as an insidious memento mori for the inflammable fabric of the city. The locus classicus of attempting to write such traces is in the opening of the second section of ‘Little Gidding’ Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. Dust inbreathed was a houseÂ€–

80

Reading the Ruins The wall, the wainscot and the mouse. The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.

(FQ 36–7)

This is akin to the creeping, persistent dust of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story ‘The Demon Lover’, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, but as a powdery residue it is granted a teleology and history: its significance comes due to it once having composed specific and nameable things. Its movement from vaporised rodents to extinguished narratives does however take a little more elucidation. For what is occurring here is the accretion of a storyÂ€– in the shape of a poemÂ€– from elements that once possessed their own stories. The relics and remnants are not, ultimately, enough to make a narrative of mourning. But despite their limits and failings the very fact of their presence means, by the third stanza, that all the elements, and even the very fabric of what remains of the churchÂ€– the ‘marred foundation … / of sanctuary and choir’ (FQ 37)Â€ – are aligned towards framing the actual encounter of mourning, and with it the knowledge that will follow. In Thomas’ poem ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ (1944) the attempt to make mourning out of suffering relies on a tripartite structure. In the first section the performance of the poem, or notes for its performance, is offered by a sparsely broken mise en page lineation that, sometimes with only a single word per line, gives stress and weight. Myselves The grievers Grieve Among the street burned to tireless death A child of a few hours With its kneading mouth Charred on the black breast of the grave The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

(CPT 107)

This is aided by its form with its recapitulation and alteration of verbs, ‘grievers’ logically gives ‘grieve’ on the line below; in the next stanza ‘singing’ begets ‘sing’Â€– but then ‘forgive’ allows ‘give’, and ‘dying’ results in a ‘cry’. This vocative imperative, this desire to transform the objects to be found in the aftermath of fire, works on the corpse of ‘a child of a few hours’. But, unlike in ‘Refusal to Mourn’, it makes a symbol of the manner of death, takes the ‘dust’, the ‘charred’ elements, the ‘fire-dwarfed’ scale of the situationÂ€ – and transforms the ‘black husk’ into a way of, again,

A metropolis aflame

81

making pantheistic sense. This sense will be felt by those who witness as the generative verbs are applied to the transformation of a violent end: ‘as your death grows, through our heart’ (CPT 107). In the second section the repetition of the line of tactile horror, ‘In the cinder of the little skull’, occurs twice, each time acting to stop the convulsive upswing of rhetoric departing from the material traces of violence. Although the panoply of Christian images is present, they are there to be questioned or rejected; the attempt to understand a teleology for sufferingÂ€– and thus to place it in a contextÂ€– opens with disavowal: ‘I know not’. The section ends with the dissipation of the experience, and indeed the whole post-Edenic world: In the cinder of the little skull, Who was the serpent’s Night fall and the fruit like a sun, Man and woman undone, Beginning crumbled back to darkness Bare as nurseries Of the garden of wilderness (CPT 108).

Against this the post-raid fragments arrayed in the third section around the signs of fireÂ€ – ‘the luminous cathedrals’ and ‘weathercocks’ molten mouths’Â€– act not only to mark the blaze but to carry forward sensations, and morality, until the verb on the penultimate line splits them apart and puts them to rest: ‘Glory glory glory / The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder’ (CPT 109). R i t ua l a n d r e de m p t ion ? But what might an elegy that uses fire and its aftermath move towards? What might it exist for apart from commemoration? Part of the answer to this can be found in the way both Eliot and Thomas position the elegiac act as a necessary part of a process, a way of beingÂ€– and of readingÂ€– that will allow a form of redemption to emerge from remembrance. The conversion of suffering into meaningful sacrifice was, inevitably, a trope of propaganda and national discourse. ‘Deaths and Entrances’ (CPT 97–8) was composed in the autumn of 1940, after Thomas had seen the Blitz at close quartersÂ€ – ‘I get nightmares like invasions’100Â€ – but it refuses to extrapolate out from individuated suffering into national fortitude. Eliot’s grand scheme, of placing conflict within a pattern that has specificity and justification, does however need to rise to a crescendo from the fire, a place of making or marking sense. So in this moral universe when

82

Reading the Ruins

‘the dove descending breaks the air / With flames of incandescent terror’ (FQ 41) it does so to bring a message: one of the potential for purification in the purgative flames of the deathly element itself. But the apparent nonchoiceÂ€– ‘of pyre or pyre’Â€– is instead that of flames serving a purpose of purification: they represent both the process and its opposition. The complexity of using flames, and the granting of fire as being a way through to another state of being, is kept back until the climactic end lines of the fifth and final section; the enfolding that in its totalising natureÂ€– ‘costing not less than everything’Â€ – turns the modes of suffering and torment, typified by ‘the shirt of flames’, into the resiliently ineffable and yet significant symbol: a portal and a consummation. What rhetorical moves allow this transformation? It has been slow in the making, taking as a starting point the ritualising desire of ‘dancing round the bonfire’ in East Coker where insight gained comes in ‘the frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars’ (FQ 13, 18). Thomas’ move to make fire itself part of a redemptive or phoenix-yielding dynamic has a lineage. Indeed in his short story ‘The Burning Baby’ (1934) he had already shaped the language of fire as ritual, and the concept of the burnt offering as redemptive: the terrors of the ‘foul womb’ become transformed as, at the climax, the dead through fire cry out and the land responds: ‘A flame touched its tongue. Eeeeh, cried the burning baby, and the illuminated hill replied’.101 This kind of pantheistic tracing of a belief system out of violence and desire, and similar forms of transformation wrought using elemental forces in his stories of the 1930s, means that the rituals in Thomas can be read theologicallyÂ€ – if not under the sign of any conventional religion. Various critics who wish to enlist him for specific ends have made such a use of Thomas’ work. The critic and lay preacher A. T. Davies focuses primarily upon Thomas’ ‘poetic vocation’ and likens the work of the poet, overtly, to that of a saint. His interpretation of Thomas’ poetry relies heavily upon this connection; especially with regards to the poet’s own perception of his role: ‘Thomas may have taken too much upon himself in his role as poet by arrogating to himself the functions of the priest; but his whole work testifies eloquently to the consistency of his efforts to be faithful to his vocation of translator to the heart.’102 This contains much that is tenuous, but there might also be a truth that could emerge from it. The mediation of spiritual beliefs into performative forms, and the types of failure when such a movement is made, allows an understanding of why ritual reaches such importanceÂ€– and why fire has a part to play. In ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ the structure of the poem carried a redemptive movement, even if the imagery

A metropolis aflame

83

dragged in another direction; in ‘Deaths and Entrances’ the difficulty is written into the conditions of trying to make art that carries significance among indiscriminate death and destruction. The tentative nature of these starting points comes from the very first lines: ‘On almost the incendiary eve / Of several near deaths’. This is a pairing that additionally opens the other two stanzas; it is a refrain that holds fire-beholden proximity, which is being applied to time as well as to structures, as well as the contingency of survival, and then makes them the point of departure. And it is a departure into the inadequacy of ritual; the grief of London is ‘estranging’, and the proximity of the living and the dead makes an elegy ever renewing as it widens outwards to encompass more individuals. But it also poses a question: is it possible, through the imposition of ritual, to find order and a ‘pattern’ (a loaded Eliotic word), but a pattern that redeems significance? The movement through the three stanzas is one enacted through the process of constellating, of holding together in brutalised proximity, the violence being done to the city and to individuals. If there is transformation of terms it is of Christian transcendence into a heavenlyÂ€– if newly blessedÂ€– array; destruction brought from the air and caused by flames releases the ‘last Sansom of your Zodiac’ (CPT 98). Thomas’ visual corollary to this hoping for, and rhetorically willing, a redemptive pattern is found in his documentary film scripts of the period, especially in Our Country (1944). In this he takes phrases seemingly torn from the poemsÂ€– but their stutter as the camera moves is compensated for in the fluidity and grace of the vista: And then the birds flying Suddenly easily as though from another country. And all the stones remember and sing The cathedral of each blitzed dead body that lay or lies In the bomber-and-dove-flown-over cemeteries Of the dumb heroic streets And the eyes of St Paul’s move over London103

The easy consolations of elegy are not present, or desired, in Thomas’ and Eliot’s wartime works that know much of the bombed and fire-torn city. But both poets take the complications of the elegiac attempt as a mechÂ� anism to bring the material conditionsÂ€– the paper, ash and flameÂ€– into contact with the possibility of rhetorical intensity that offers, however unconvincingly (to the poet as well as the reader) the possibilities for a ritual to give solace and sense; some flames burn and some fold meaning, as well as history, into a single party and a singleÂ€– complexÂ€– image.

84

Reading the Ruins F i r e a n d pa pe r

In Powell and Pressburger’s subtle if propagandistic film 49th Parallel (1941) a group of stranded German U-boatmen make their way across Canada towards the still neutral United States. As one by one they are caught or killed, they reveal not only the thuggish contours of Nazi ideolÂ�ogy but also certain traits or instinctively totalitarian responses. They give a French Canadian a lecture on eugenics; in a community of Mennonite refugee settlers they all jump to their feet on hearing the Führer’s name. But the most telling moment comes near the close where the two surviving crewmen chance upon an effete traveller-writer, a Robert Byron or Norman Douglas type. They inveigle their way into his camp in the woods, but then commence, after pleasantries, to tie him upÂ€– and start burning his books. Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus goes on the fire, along with a Picasso and other objets trouvés of ‘degeneracy’, and the scene is complete. Miles from LondonÂ€– miles from any city at allÂ€– the Nazis continue to behave according to their inescapable and inflammatory template of evil. The entwined tropes of Nazism and fire have been annotated and debated ad infinitum, from censorship and bonfire to Götterdämmerung templates for national self-immolation.104 But writing about fire in London in the Second World War, the city where Powell and Pressburger’s script was just being finished while the Luftwaffe threatened,105 meant a negotiation with representation. For fire, a fundamentally unstable force, was one which was intent not only on destroying and consuming, but also on releasing aesthetic pleasure and intense potential for art, as it remade the cityscape with incendiary violence.

Ch apter 3

Surrealism and the bombsites

You know I’d have thought an air raid was just the thing for a Â�surréaliste; it ought to give you plenty of compositionsÂ€– limbs and things lying about in odd places you know. Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (1942)1

On 13 June 1940, just as German tanks entered Paris but before the bombing of London had started in earnest, Zwemmers art gallery on Litchfield Street in Soho opened a long-planned exhibition. It was organised under the auspices of the British Surrealist Group (which was, at this very point, engaged in expelling over two-thirds of its own members for various forms of deviationism and lack of commitment). The exhibition showcased works from younger artists such as John Banting, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar as well as those by more established names including Henry Moore, Edward Burra and Paul Nash.2 Reviews ranged from the uncomfortably enthused, through the mixed, to the overtly dismissive: ‘At a moment like this Surrealism seems unnecessary … Surrealism can be a good psychological cocktail, but cocktail time is over’.3 However some who visited the gallery had reasons for a more vivid reaction. Soldiers just back from Dunkirk saw the works presented in a rather different light after their experience of battle. To them the shock of disjointed images and violent juxtapositions was now minimal: ‘“This isn’t strange to us,” they said, “it’s just like what we’ve been seeing over there.”’4 This observation by some anonymous soldiers, far more than the relative success or failure of the exhibition,5 captures a key dynamic of Second World War culture: the way in which surrealism made a complex and intriguing transition. For it moved from being a newly imported foreign sensation in the 1930s to acquiring popular recognition as fearfully ‘premonitory’6 at the outbreak of warÂ€– encoding the excess of fearful possibility beyond the rational. Finally it was naturalised as a mode of dealing with extraordinary, implausible and terrifying sights. Indeed for many 85

86

Reading the Ruins

of the writers, photographers and artists who lived and worked through the Blitz, the cityscape of bombed London continually invited the casual adjectival use of the term ‘surreal’: a bus flung upside-down into a tree; tombs blown open; a cascade of rubble through the surviving doorway of a chapel; the smell in the wind as an entire warehouse of coffee burned. Surrealism thus became a tool for writing about the bombsites, and for registering aesthetic wonder and intrigue at devastation, especially as its cultural template guarded against charges of overt voyeurism or morbidity. The proleptic nature of this aesthetic was also remarked upon in 1943 by the British novelist Inez Holden as she reflected back on the strangeness of the Blitz: One morning I walked back through the park, and saw the highest branches of a tree draped with marabout, with some sort of silk, with two or three odd stockings [and] … balanced on a twig was a brand new bowler hat. They had all been blown across the street from the bombed hotel opposite. A Surrealist painter who I knew slightly was staring at this, too. He said: ‘Of course we were painting this kind of thing years ago, but it has taken some time to get here.’7

The view that the cityscape of blitzed London had been foretold in 1930s art and literature was not limited to Holden’s unnamed artist or to the soldiers visiting the exhibition at Zwemmers; and yet surrealism’s proleptic aspect was only one small part of its significance to wartime culture.8 To understand the significance of surrealism in 1939–45, the history of the concept and the aesthetic in 1930s Britain has to be first addressed. Pr e -wa r s u r r e a l i s m i n Br i ta i n Histories of surrealism in Britain find it hard to define a clear and unambiguous beginning. There had been signs and portents in various forms of engagement with post-Vorticist aesthetics or Dadaesque literary experiments: but these had been the preserve of a small number of francophile writers and artists, or those who read elusive imported magazines such as Transition and This Quarter. But in Britain some art and literature was being created that merits at least a proto-surrealist appellation: notably the jointly authored Mortmere short fictions of Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood in the late 1920s; the visits to Paris by the artists involved in the Unit One group, and their resulting works; and the exhibition in London in 1933 of pictures by Joan Miró, Jean Arp and Max Ernst at the Mayor Gallery. In the late 1920s the student journal Experiment in Cambridge featured articles and poems that owed much to


87

French surrealism, as well as involving one of the figures who would later become crucial to its British development and popularisation: Humphrey Jennings.9 For a plausible point of origin it is impossible to ignore the publication of David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism in October 1935. In this book Gascoyne, who moved peripatetically between Paris and London, attempted to give an account of artistic ideas and key figures in the French movement. Allied to this was Gascoyne’s translation of André Breton’s What is Surrealism?, which appeared later in the same year and set out some central precepts. Together these volumes illustrated the liberatory promise of breaking through rationality, the need to understand the fragment as significant, and the operation of chance in artistic creationÂ€– with both books culminating in Breton’s definition: surrealism: n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally or in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.10

Within months, these ideas had galvanised British visual and literary art. But they would also give rise to irresolvable tensions that would both animate the movement and strain it; and these tensions would persist into the Second World War. For surrealism in Britain ultimately encompassed an assortment of radical and conflicting activities: psychoanalysis, anti-fascist action, avant-garde poetry, the pioneering sociology of MassObservation, and experimental cinema. The most prominent initial public manifestation of such possibilities in Britain was the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in the New Burlington Galleries from 12 June to 4 July 1936. After Eluard and Breton visited London in April, a committee was arranged to co-ordinate a showcase for both French and British work; its members included Jennings, Roland Penrose, Hugh Sykes Davies, Henry Moore and David Gascoyne. Over 23,000 people visited the exhibition, which mixed works by British artists with those from France, Denmark and Belgium. Invited luminaries gave lectures: Breton, Eluard, and notoriously Dali. There were also poetry readings and showings of films including Un Chien Andalou. It was an astutely performance-orientated eventÂ€– typified by the organisers garnering publicity by ringing up Selfridges department store en masse to ask for a definition of surrealism.11 But what did such an event do for the movement in Britain? The metamorphosis surrealism underwent in its transplantation across the Channel has been explored in several

88

Reading the Ruins

critical works;12 however a common thread is the replication in Britain on a smaller scale of many of the French processes of schism, political engagement and the growing complexity of divergent approaches.13 In France surrealism developed between the first (1925) and second (1930) manifestos towards overt political commitment, typified by the change of the name of the journal from La Révolution Surréaliste to Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution; and a comparable trajectory was followed by some members in Britain who began to see political import in an awakening of theÂ€unconscious. Yet apparently apolitical bodies, fetished in transmogrification or in extremis, provided the iconic moments of the opening night of the exhibÂ� ition: Dali delivering his speech from inside a diver’s suit; Sheila LeggeÂ€– the surrealist phantomÂ€ – wandering through the crowds with her face covered in rose petals. These shock tactics, and a cosy accommodation with a certain fascinated strata of London society,14 seemed to be domesticating the impetus of the movement away from its threatening French revolutionary basis and towards it becoming just another cultural fad. David Gascoyne, one of the organisers, felt this acutely: In England Surrealism was thought to be something artistic (with a vague revolutionary aspect which was forgotten as soon as possible). Last year there was an enormous International Surrealist Exhibition: can you imagine it: it was madly successful, chic, mildly, faintly, shocking, ‘amusing’. I was so fed up that I almost at once joined the Communist Party and for several months was immersed in political action.15

This disillusionment with depoliticisation did not affect all who encountered the exhibition; indeed a division began to appear among British surrealists as to the true ideological dimension of the movement, albeit couched as an argument concerning a search for origins. Herbert Read, in the collection of essays that he edited with the assistance of Hugh Sykes-Davies, attempted to authenticate a home-grown lineage of writing and art leading to Surrealism.16 As Nicholls notes, the split between the French and British contributors becomes marked as Sykes-Davies expounds an argument from the principle of literary precedent, enlisting the work of Coleridge and Lewis Carroll before ending with this cri de coeur: ‘in all the essentials of Romanticism Surrealism continues the earlier movement’. In addition he saw the ‘advantage’ that ‘where romanticism is notoriously inchoate, disorderly, intuitive, Surrealism is organised, orderly and conscious’.17 Such a vision of the movement was not amenable to any revolutionary breaking down of psychic barriersÂ€– and


89

therefore it is unsurprising that the British Surrealist Group formed in the wake of the International Exhibition was riven with internecine splits. For a more politically charged direction was present in Britain as well as France, especially in the work of those such as Roger Roughton. His editorial in the ‘Surrealist’ double issue of his magazine, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, laid out the possibilities for a cultural popular front that would let surrealist writers work towards revolution: ‘Surrealist work, while not directly calling for revolutionary intervention, can be classed as revolutionary in so far as it can break down bourgeois-taught prejudices, thus preparing the mental ground for positive revolutionary thought and action.’18 Roughton later closed Contemporary Poetry and Prose when he went off to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. This yoking together of different kinds of revolution was also made explicit in David Gascoyne’s conclusion to his essay on the subject a year earlier. For while the surrealist method could be utilised for important political ends, it was, in his view, utterly reliant upon the insights of Marxist doctrine: ‘Without the philosophy of dialectical materialism behind it Surrealism could hardly have existed until today as a living force’.19 His view grew stronger later in the decade and was summarised in his adage: ‘The revolution has no need of poetry, but poetry has a great need of the revolution’.20 One of the immediate consequences of surrealism in Britain involved another kind of revolution. This is what Charles Madge, Tom Harrison and Humphrey Jennings intended when they founded Mass-Observation, a project that would combine urban anthropology with a desire to find the uncanny in the surfaces and hidden resonances of contemporary culture. For while the logic and structure of quantitative academic anthropology seems far from surrealist provocation, what they envisaged was very different. Their initial ‘plan of campaign’ listed an assortment of topics for observation on a nationwide basis: We are … working out a complete plan of campaign, which will be possible when we have not fifty but 5,000 observers. The following are a few examples of problems that will arise: Behaviour of people at war memorials. Shouts and gestures of motorists. The aspidistra cult. Anthropology of football pools. Bathroom behaviour. Beards, armpits, eyebrows. Anti-Semitism.

90

Reading the Ruins

Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke. Funerals and undertakers. Female taboos about eating. The private lives of midwives.21

The playfulness of this list is apparent. But beyond that, as Rod Mengham has outlined, ‘the research interest implied in the links between bodily functions and unconscious social behaviour would be just as much the natural concern of an anthropological enquiry as an exclusively surrÂ� ealist enterprise’.22 Overall the manifesto is well characterised by Michel Remy as ‘running halfway between the ghosts of Freud and Marx’.23 He also makes the pertinent point that the movement of Mass-Observation towards its role as a semi-official arm of the state in the war years, monitoring reactions during the Blitz,24 must not obscure how radical it was originally, as it ‘aimed at giving working-class and middle-class people a chance to speak about themselves and for themselves’.25 Such a model for discovering the unifying and diagnostic myths for society leads towards the mass expression of a collectiveÂ€– as well as personalÂ€– unconscious. It thus presages attempts by poets of the 1940s who use surrealist Â�methods for approaching overtly social or theological ends, especially when attempted through the redefinitionÂ€– and useÂ€– of the term ‘myth’. The poetic structures that were built to take such weight will be considered later in the chapter. T h e org a n ic i s t t u r n Parallel to hopes that Mass-Observation could allow access to the hidden structures of society, came literary works from writers who used, and altered, surrealist precepts of disassociation and the operation of chance. A personal truth was sought through both the corporeal body and the British landscape, rather than through the unconscious mind. Various histories of surrealism attempt to find a rationaleÂ€– and then a languageÂ€– to express a position with regard to a ‘truly’ surrealist centre. Remy notes the hawk and megalith paintings of Paul Nash as being concerned with a ‘projection of metamorphosis … the repository of personal dream images and symbols and universal archetypes … a translating, so to speak’;26 while Ray charts why and how Auden ‘used surrealist devices to make his didactic points … a kind of pseudo-surrealism’.27 Two of the most interesting of the writers who took much from surrealism, while renewing ideas of conscious craft, were Dylan Thomas and George Barker. Their work of the late 1930s also moved towards organic forms that coupled the body


91

with plants, trees and flowers. Both diverged from contemporary socialrealist notionsÂ€ – and enthused their subject matter with horror as well as manifest absurdity. The political import of their visions could appear to be obscured beneath the viscerality, but at times a direct connection is made, both with surrealist influences and a putative political significance. Barker’s visit to the London International Surrealist Exhibition, and his collection of body-shock moments, were woven together in his book-length poem Calamiterror (1937): I recall how the rosetree sprang out of my breast. I recall the myriads of birds in the cage of my head I recall my third finger the branch of myrtle I recall the imprisoned women wailing in my bowels. I was the figure of the Surrealist Exhibition With the mass of roses face.28

This is not a dreamscape or a willed vision; rather, it is the created and crafted assemblage of images, with a controlling lyric subject position arranging them. The sequence as a whole ends with an emergence from an investigation of the guts and sensations of selfhoodÂ€– and, coupled with a heritage of radical romanticism, declares itself ‘for Spain’. Connections between Barker’s and Thomas’ works, and lives,29 were made by contemporary critics and have been repeated variously since.30 Just as in Barker’s work, the human bodies in Thomas’ late 1930s texts, in both poetry and prose, also exist in a charged relationship with the organic world around them. This is partly a particularly Welsh preoccupation: the renewal of the Blodeuwedd myth of a woman of flowers within the exigencies of 1930s Swansea. Yet an examination of notions of Â�organicism and the corporeal provides a specific link between Thomas and Barker, one based on the vulnerable and organically traumatised body. Barker contributed an earlier version of book one of Calamiterror, entitled ‘X stanzas’, to the August 1936 Picasso special edition of Contemporary Poetry and Prose.31 Barker’s final text owes much to Thomas’ story ‘The Burning Baby’, published in the first number of the same magazine three months earlier.32 Both attempt to depict birth and death conjoined in Â�viscerality; but with the laconic limpidity of ThomasÂ€– ‘The bush burned out and the face of the baby fell away with the smoking leaves’Â€– remade and inverted by Barker into the hysterically symbolic ‘burns / The babe with the salamander in his breast’.33 Thomas and Barker only represent some of the more acute examples of what can be termed the organicist turn in the use of surrealist methods in

92

Reading the Ruins

British poetry and art; and tracking this shift has become a commonplace among critics of both the literary and visual in British culture.34 This movement to the landscapeÂ€– and the bodyÂ€– is present in the late 1930s paintings of Grace Pailthorpe, Thomas Samuel Haile and Julian TrevelyanÂ€– as well as in Roland Penrose’s artists’ book (and gift to the photographer Lee Miller) The Road is Wider than Long (1939). The poetry of David Gascoyne in the late 1930s returns again and again to ‘thorns’, which occupy a posÂ� ition between theology and the organic, as do the illustrations of his work by Graham Sutherland. Indeed Raymond Mortimer, when reviewing Sutherland’s pictures of the early 1940s, invoked both Samuel Palmer and Picasso as unified in the images by their ‘metamorphosing [of] natural scenery into landscapes that have the suggestive power of romantic poetry and music’.35 Sutherland’s other wartime drawings continue upon such a pathÂ€– but they return questions of organic transmutation to the spaces of the city. Accounts of the decay of surrealism in Britain often culminate, in the account of some critics, in the organicist turn. It is portrayed as a diffusion into a generalised scenery-fixated neo-romanticismÂ€ – and such a story has a schematic neatness: its narrative of surrealism moves through growth, complexity and rapid decline into merely a version of the pasÂ� toral. It is a position typified by critics, for example Nicholls, who sees that ‘just as many of the painters of the Surrealist Group became fascinated with bio-morphic forms, so the English “neo-Surrealist” writers tended to find their materials in “nature” rather than in the modern, urban scene that Breton, for example, traversed in Nadja’.36 To such a critique the war years then represent the final tailing off of British surrealism into insignificance. Wa r t i m e i s ‘s u r r e a l’ Such a reading of cultural history is incomplete. It can be refined by a consideration of what the term ‘surrealism’ meant during wartime, and what relationship the war use of the concept had with 1930s doctrines. The British Surrealist Group survived the war, despite fractious meet ings and constant schisms. However, while few of the works produced by its official members have achieved lasting aesthetic significance in a history of wartime culture,37 it is also true that some of the most interesting art and writing of 1939–45 was produced by those influenced by their own, individual and partial, encounters with 1930s surrealism. For in retrospect it is clear that for some of the more interesting figures of the


93

period, surrealist concepts were points of departure rather than doctrinal truths, provocations rather than guide rails. But beyond the absorption of the term into wider discourse comes another, more complex, issue. For a consideration of surrealism in the Second World War changes how we see British wartime cultureÂ€– and also how we see the history of surrealism in Britain, and the teleology used to analyse it. This chapter, therefore, does not make the claim that the Second World War represented the apogee of the movement; rather, it will be concerned with how surrealism provided the conditions of possibility for various aesthetic strategies to engage with wartime London. This was a very different engagement compared with that of the pre-war surrealist movements in both London and Paris. For a mode that had seemed outlandish and contrived now became an explanatory tool in unprecedented situations, enabling reportage when more conventional tropes appeared debased or inadequate. The Second World War would force a renewed questioning of the political import in attempts to write or paint from the unconscious, making artists and writers, now isolated from the Continent, seek a British lineage for their creativity. Yet the years 1939–45 were also to bring back to centrality the originatory zone of surrealism: the city. The wartime city now focused on was however a very different spaceÂ€ – one transformed by bomb damageÂ€– and thus filled with juxtapositions, resurgent vegetation, horrific tableaux, and significant fragments. The remainder of this chapter will consider six of the key figures in British Second World War culture, including an artist, a film-maker and a painter. These case studies will move in differing directions, some dealing with the conflict between theory and practice, some with the materiality of subject matter. It will operate by pairing them together so to reveal how the pervasive legacy of surrealism shaped works that emerged from and depicted the bombsites. T u r n i ng f r ag m e n t s i n t o s t ruc t u r e s: Dav i d G a s c oy n e a n d J. F. H e n dr y The wartime works of David Gascoyne and J. F. Hendry demonstrate how Surrealism could act as a resource and yet also a point of departure. Both poets attempted to move from individuated mental visions to larger configurations that could speak to a wider audience and reflect on actuality. Thus both endeavoured to fit the chaos and debris of Second World WarÂ€– specifically and symbolically the London bombsitesÂ€– into grand structures and narratives: for Hendry this was through reappropriation of the mythic, for Gascoyne it was quasi-theological.

94

Reading the Ruins

To portray David Gascoyne (1916–2002) as pre-eminently a war poet, and one whose work engages with the material wreckage of the bombed city, would seem to show an idiosyncratic view of literary history. For discussions of his poetryÂ€ – and indeed lifeÂ€ – continually depict him as ‘a Surrealist poet’ of the 1930s. This is both troublingly true and false. Gascoyne’s position as a surrealist writer and proselytiser in 1933–7, notÂ� ably with the Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), is uncomplicated enough; as is his position in a specific social and artistic matrix that encompassed the International Surrealist Exhibition, friendships with notable French writers, and his inspirational effect on other poets at the time. But his subsequent literary career, and the poems and plays he produced, make matters rather more complex. Recently the importance of his late 1930s writings and translations, and his involvement with the anthropology of Mass-Observation, have begun to be critically acknowledged;38 but his wartime works still remain neglected. The writings indeed present both textual and material problems: they track his continuing movement away from surrealism and towards an idiosyncratically English form of existentialist Christianity39 (this finally led to his being formally expelled from the reconstituted postwar London Surrealist Group for ‘mystification’), and they also lead towards absencesÂ€– some of his most interesting poems were never fully completed and thus only exist in note form. In 1942 he described how his work had changed: I feel that poetry of the magical categoryÂ€– product of sheer imagination, unrestricted by pure design and untempered by the wisdom of disillusionmentÂ€– may be more stimulating, more immediately satisfying to write; but in the long run it is probably less rewarding, less consoling, than that resulting from conflict between the instinctive poetic impulse and impersonal discipline, the unadorned sobriety of realistic ‘sense’.40

This turn from the ‘magical’ was presaged in his translations and adaptations: Hölderlin’s Madness (1938), which coupled four of Gascoyne’s own poems inspired by Hölderlin to his translation; and his late 1930s works dedicated to Pierre Jean Jouve, the French writer who had led him towards psychoanalysis. Thus the aspect that persists into the war itself and marks the continuities withÂ€– as well as the ruptures fromÂ€– the surrealist method is the sustained interest in how fragments can be aligned and meaning gleaned from them. His poems from this period as a whole were collected in the extraordinary volume published by Editions Poetry London, Poems 1937–42 (1943). This book shows how varied and intense Gascoyne’s work of the period was, and also how it had evolved within the


95

Figure 2â•‡ Graham Sutherland’s cover for David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–42

time period delineated. Moreover the volume as object is starkly memorable for its cover drawings and illustrations by Graham Sutherland, all of which were produced in response to Gascoyne’s poems (See Fig. 2). Gascoyne chose Sutherland, upon being asked by his publisher Tambimuttu to recommend an artist, partly on the basis of the two pictures he had exhibited in the 1936 exhibition, partly because of his admiration for Sutherland’s more recent painting, Entrance to a Lane (1939). This work owes much to dreamscape forms, but grafts them on to a rural scene: a recognisable and lush terrain that yet carries menace.41 The parallel with Gascoyne’s own trajectory towards representation and away from automatism is clear. This collaboration resulted in over ten illustrations, of which five were used in the book. I will return to Sutherland’s

96

Reading the Ruins

illustrations in the section devoted to him; but it is worth acknowledging their effect of folding Gascoyne’s violent visions into a teleology that culminated in the war writing. Z e ro hou r a n d no m a n’s l a n d The fears of what might be revealed or unleashed by psychic, as well as physical, division marks Gascoyne’s immediate response to the outbreak of war in 1939. Yet concepts of the fractured unconscious as a motor for action were not limited to the surrealists. There were plausible military and cultural reasons to require the populace to be able to split off an emotional response: how else to kill on command or keep calm in an air raid? But there was also, lurking as a threat, fears of fragmentation; the culmination of the aerial paranoia of the 1930s, as described in Chapter 1, was the terror that London would break down in chaos, with mental casualties outstripping the physically injured on a ratio of 10:1.42 Against such rhetoric the paralysed fear of oblivion in Gascoyne’s early war poems can be understood. Repeated references to ‘the void’Â€– and nullity, ‘nada’ or ‘zero’Â€– predominate in both his journal entries and his poems. However both literary forms are complicated by him finding relief in actual and external combat: At the same moment the mental and physical war that had been going on inside me for weeks and monthsÂ€– perhaps years?Â€– beforehand, suddenly reached its final cataclysm, and I knew that it had come to an end, had in fact already ended. Zero is over. Now I have some sort of assurance and strength which I never had before.43

Alongside this clarity of purpose, the eclipse of individuated turmoil, came poems that refused such certainty: ‘Zero’ (from 1939) also took the idea of an absolute recalibrationÂ€ – ‘for this is the zero hour’Â€ – but found it merely ‘emptier than air’.44 This emptying of the signifiers and facing the ‘void’ was the culmination of a pre-war poetic process. For Gascoyne the modern city, especially at night, had previously had a quality that would allow a wanderer to discern revelatory links. These links functioned between erasÂ€ – an insight that he developed in Night Thoughts (1955), his ‘Radiophonic Poem’. Furthermore the city’s quality enabled the connection of disparate objects to form a narrative hitherto unnoticed. The lineage from works of high Parisian surrealism, such as André Breton’s Nadja or Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, is clear. Gascoyne’s works of the late 1930s held a sense of spiritual vacuity in balance with a


97

fascination for what signs or words could be fleetingly discerned. The city was for Gascoyne a space that could contain such signs and significant objects, allowing a form of automatic writing to emerge by sheer perambulation. Typical attempts to grasp scribal traces come in the opening to ‘Noctambules’, his pre-war (1938) homage to Djuna Barnes: They stand in doorways; then Step out into the rain Beneath the lamplight’s blue Aurora; down the street Towards the blood-red sign Scrawled swiftly on the wet Slate of the midnight sky (SP 119)

Here the sign on the sky is soon erased, and the knowable markers that followÂ€ – street signs, names of bars, the ‘mad monotone of the Lord’s prayer’Â€– all vanish into the dark. The dark of the blackout itself becomes an overriding theme for Gascoyne’s wartime poems, a dark punctuated with merely a ‘translucent apparition’ amid the ‘maze of stone’Â€– which furthermore becomes, after bombing, a ‘maze of broken brick’ (SP 131) in a poem written only months later. And still the void, the ‘ultimate nothing’, awaits. In ‘Inferno’ (SP 82) a response to the Blitz becomes a meditation on what hollow vastness might be beyond or within fire. This is a broken sonnet of thirteen lines, with an alliterative bundle of fractures at its heart, as both the ‘screen’ and the ‘shield’ are left ‘splintering’ to reveal what is ‘over the edge’. This gap is enacted, moreover, by the mise en page one-line space left blank or, as the poem describes it, the ‘Void’. Against an art that places the ‘Void’ as the centre of existence comes a contrasting strain in Gascoyne’s poems in the early 1940s. Searching for meaning continues, most importantly in ‘The Gravel-Pit Field’ (SP 137–9), which dates from 1941. This poem is significant for it is avowedly materiÂ� alist; its attempts to make theological and moral speculations return to a specific landscape rather than words or sensations. This landscape is a field, half excavated and half abandoned, just ‘a stretch of scruffy pockmarked waste’, yet it becomes a zone where the attempt to extract significance from debris is rehearsed: Amidst this nondescript terrain Haphazardly the gravel pits’ Rough-hewn rust-coloured hollows yawn, Their steep declivities away From field-surface dropping down

98

Reading the Ruins Towards the depths below where rainWater in turbid pools stagnates Like scraps of sky decaying in The sockets of a dead man’s stare

(SP 137)

The connective movements tracked in this stanza do not however produce realisation or graspable meaning; and the list of assorted objects found fails to give order to this site: the mongrel bones recovered might (or might not) be those of a saint; a cigarette packet could have miraculous lettering (but may not). Illumination finally comes like a parachuteÂ€flare: Across this scene, and in a flash Of insight I behold this field’s Apotheosis: No-man’s-land Between this world and the beyond, Remote from any man and yet more real

(SP 138)

What this ‘No-man’s-land’ suggests is the extent to which the writing of the Second World War was still using the terms of the First.45 But now the landscape of war is in English fields, and now the detachment of God from man has become total: the only inadequate signs lie in the debris. This is a poem about drifts of debris that are clearly not part of an actual bombsite, but it is place that holds both Gascoyne’s totalising fear of bombing, as noted in his journal entries,46 and his desire to use artistically the redolent spaces that were thereby opened up. While others could have seen such a rubble-strewn field in West London in terms of the BetjemanesqueÂ€ – the suburban poignancy in abandoned developments along the Great West RoadÂ€– Gascoyne rather finds it a space to rehearse both the physical landscape of, and his artistic responses to, the inevitable bombsites to come. B ac k t o t h e b om b s i t e s After the publication of Poems in 1943, Gascoyne completed little else for the rest of the conflict. However, the unfinished poems he worked on represent the ultimate point of his engagement with the destruction of cities in the Second World War, and they concern actual, rather than implied, bombsites. What exists, amid the notes and abandoned attempts, shows the outlines of his bleakly inescapable preoccupations. Indeed Gascoyne commented that the ruined cityscape of London and other cities, especially Plymouth, had become imprinted upon his mind


99

as he toured as a travelling actor during 1942–3, and how he had felt haunted by them for years afterwards.47 The centrality of the bombed city as a space that conditions all attempts at subsequent selfhood becomes marked, albeit obliquely, in ‘A Vagrant’ (1948–9). As the titular poem of his 1950 collection, it is a bleak but loquacious dramatic monologue; a tramp’s-eye view of theology, but with the ever-stressed possibility that pavement philosophising extends beyond stones and bricks into a critique of a postwar and post-Christian world. In it the overwhelming mode of the long lines is ennui and vacancy; with the human body becoming, through synecdoche, a way of understanding a city polis: ‘I stand still in my Â�quasi-dereliction’ or ‘the city’s lack and mine are much the same’ (SP 151). Though overtly about Paris, with specific references such as the ‘quais’ and a bookcase-bedhead ‘cosy corner’, it carries a more abstracted critique of what it might mean to live theologically among the rubble. Alongside this savage musing must be put one of Gascoyne’s least successful works of the war yearsÂ€– ‘Fragments Towards a Religio Poetae’ (SP 172–5). This is a repetitiously insistent poem, decrying the godlessness of the contemporary world and pleading, in stumblingly long polysyllabic lines, for a return and attentiveness to God. The numbered sections attempting various pleas for ‘Justice’ and the intercession of Christ are part of thisÂ€ – as are the repeated capitalised entreaties: ‘Being, Truth, Light’. It is possible to see amid the didactic purpose how the various broken sections operate. In the implied concatenation of different voices, there is an attempt to move beyond the singularity of a dramatic monologue to the creation of multiple voicesÂ€– and characters that emerge from the material conditions of a city at war. Hence the sights of Jerusalem or the typology of Christ’s life give over to the mundane exigencies of wartime London, the ‘queue / outside the horse butcher’s or for the homebound bus’ (SP 175). But ultimately amid these minor works stands a more significant shard: ‘The Bomb-site Anchorite’ (1948/9). I believe this poem has good claims to be one of the most intriguing uncompleted works of twentiethcentury British literature. The only part published is one short extract of twenty-one lines in an appendix to Gascoyne’s final Selected Poems (1994). The exegesis offered on the facing page is an extended note by Gascoyne exploring and partially explaining why it could not be completed. What he had planned was a three-page or more long meditation on the possibility for ‘post-Auschwitz theology’ (SP 251). The form would have been an extended encounter between a narrator and a reclusive figure of knowledge, a hermit who lived in the shells of shattered buildings: a bombsite

100

Reading the Ruins

anchorite. If completed it would have formed the centrepiece to his collection A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950) and would have offered a continuation, he felt, of his faltering religious quest. ‘The Bomb-site Anchorite’ has to be partly understood as another of Gascoyne’s unfinished dramatic monologues, but one that would use mise en page to show how not all the words were those of the protagonistÂ€– some would be designated as ventriloquised or found.48 According to Gascoyne the central space described in the poem would have been the altar the anchorite was to build outside his hut, situated deep in the wastes of the bombed city. This shrine was to have been composed of rubble and fragmentsÂ€– as Gascoyne said laconically: ‘bits of buildings, cornices of churches, shattered pediments’.49 Inscribed upon this altar would be the unevenly carved line: ‘to the Unknown God’ (SP 251). The general formal problems of composition were overshadowed by Gascoyne’s dilemma in rendering the intense figure of the anchorite, and the fragment makes a virtue of this: If now to memory’s retina his face Returns to tremble into brief relief More frequently than most do, that might be Because of the abnormal evening glare By which his features were so keenly lit When first I focused eyes on him (SP 250)

The anchorite is both memorable, but then alsoÂ€– laterÂ€– so illuminated as to be beyond description. By the close of the fragment the encounter ends the evocation with a voidlike oblivion as his visage: â•…â•…â•… He met my gaze With blank unyielding imperturbability Which at once made him an enigma to me …

(SP 250)

This figure of the bombsites enacts the searching that had so preoccupied Gascoyne’s earlier poemsÂ€– but he is himself also now a ‘void’.50 A man of intense light, amid the wastelands of broken building and beside his altar, he reaches a state where he cannot be described physically: he is so ‘scoured by the flushed sky’s abrasive radiance’ as to dissolve. But this is not a holy apparition. Without the certainties of faith, for Gascoyne the anchorite as a figure of light is a symbol of despair, showing the limits of language and remaining a true ‘enigma’.


101

In Gascoyne’s unfinished poem, and in the descriptions in his note of how he intended the complete poem to appear, there is an overt synthesis of the two traditions of making sense of debris: the fragment hidden and the fragment displayed.51 Here the unification of strategies of portraying salvage within the works as content leads on to the concept of salvage as formÂ€– what can be taken, even if in scraps, from the literary wreckage. This then leads to the position of a work that moves to ‘embedding’ or ‘displaying’ recovered texts. This is because the anchorite wouldÂ€– as proposed by GascoyneÂ€ – be concerned with the collecting of fragments of belief and ideology embedded in the wreckage of the city, as well as the physical shards of brick and stone. All this would be sensed by him and then recovered. Then the altar, multifaceted and seeming to tower above the scene, represents the final position of the ‘display’ trajectoryÂ€– as the collected fragments now displayed become a cue or prop to thought itself. The bombsite altar is then the key and overarching image, as it brings to the fore the survival of a belief in the power of language. The anchorite would have only existed, as Gascoyne commented in his explicatory note, to ‘give utterance through him to my own meditations on the question of whether it is possible any longer to envisage the divine in the second half of the 20th century’ (SP 251). The poems of the late 1940s that he completed measured their success through keeping alive a hope for spirituality that in this unfinished work come to seem so elusive. Gascoyne’s disappearance from postwar cultural or critical centrality came about through a climate of profound hostility towards his aesthetic, as well as being a result of the contingencies of his life. But he was not the only poet who emerged from surrealism, endured the war, found bombsites both a zone of fear and inspiration, and thenÂ€– for various reasonsÂ€– was forgotten. A p o c a ly p t ic s Looking back over wartime poetry in 1945, Stephen Spender attempted to give an explanation for what had happened to surrealism during the Second World War: The immense resources of all the governments of the world are now being devoted to producing surrealist effects. Surrealism has ceased to be fantasy, its ‘objects’ hurtle round our heads, its operations cause the strangest conjunctions of phenomena in the most unexpected places, its pronouncements fill the newspapers. The youngest and newest school of English poets signified this occasion by calling themselves ‘apocalyptics’.52

102

Reading the Ruins

Spender here attempts to capture the apparent materialisation of surrealism, its move from the prophetic to the actual. His ‘younger poets’, the New Apocalyptics, comprised a movement that is pivotal to the understanding of what happened to surrealism in British literary culture as it engaged with the material world. The movement is also fundamental to understanding how poets found a way of connecting with total war, andÂ€ – especiallyÂ€ – with aerial attack on cities. The New Apocalyptics, with their anthologies of poetry and prose, magazines and highly developed theories, have remained until the past decade one of the least studied, while most derided, moments in twentieth-century British literature. Recent scholarship has begun to untangle how they so dominated wartime culture and also unpick why postwar literary judgements so marginalised and mocked them.53 However, the centrality to this movement of the poet-theorist J. F. Hendry, instigator of the initial manifesto and editor of the anthologies, has still to be explored. The history of how and why writers came to label themselves ‘Apocalyptic’ is itself complex. Even in his own retrospective essay of 1980, ‘The Image and the Myth’, Hendry showed how the wordÂ€– and initial ideaÂ€ – for the movement was drawn from terms already in wide cultural circulation.54 Critics have tracked how this loaded term was used in the late 1930s, from D. H. Lawrence’s continuing influence through his writings on Revelation, to George Barker ‘achieving Apocalypse’ in 1937 in relation to political awareness.55 However the programme produced by Hendry, Henry Treece and John Goodland in Leeds in early 1938 raises more questions than answers as it attempts to define what ‘Apocalyptic Writing’ should be aiming for at that precise historical point. This manifesto brought together a desire for ‘greater freedom, economic no less than aesthetic, from machines and mechanistic thinking’ with an attack on ‘the Machine Age [that] had exerted too strong an influence on art’, before concluding with a battle cry: ‘Myth, as a personal means of reintegrating the personality, had been neglected and despised’.56 Marina MacKay’s critique of this textÂ€– ‘as Modernist manifestos go theirs was a little impoverished’57Â€ – shows pointed understatement; but it is possible to see within it the problematic double inheritance of technophobic high modernism, but also, more interestingly, of surrealism. These writers saw surrealist methods as devices, not ends in themselves. Henry Treece asked in an essay entitled ‘An Apocalyptic Writer and the Surrealists’, which was published in the first anthology of the group, ‘Is all material which presents itself to the writer by psychic automatism of an equal artistic value?’, before deciding it certainly was not.58 Later in the war the essay


103

‘Apocalypse in Poetry’ lays out the belief that the movement was a development of surrealism: The New Apocalypse, in a sense, derives from Surrealism, and one might even call it a dialectical development of it: the next step forward. It embodies what is positive in Surrealism, ‘the effort’, in Herbert Read’s phrase, ‘to realise some of the dimensions and characteristics of man’s submerged being’. It denies what is negativeÂ€– Surrealism’s own denial of man’s right to exercise conscious control, either of his political and social destinies, or the material offered to him, as an artist, by his subconscious mind.59

This theory led, however, to the generalised domestication of any surrealist material in the poetry produced by a wide range of writers, whose work featured the reworking of the semi-unconscious through the blunt use of a toolkit containing Gothic and generally portentous images. Such poetry, and its perceived dominance in wartime magazines, led to suspicion and post hoc critical attacks. For literary history and the weight of cultural judgements was, from the 1950s onwards, one of virtually unanimous and virulent antipathy.60 A few barbs will suffice to demonstrate: for Andrew Sinclair, ‘the New Apocalypse was a confused movement springing from a confused reaction … it never had the power it was said to have’;61 A. T. Tolley felt ‘Hendry’s poem “Apocalypse” from The New Apocalypse is representatively dreadful’.62 For other critics, such as Charles Tomlinson, this becomes a more generalised indictment of a lineage: ‘incoherence of style and incoherence of moral content are concomitants inherited from Barker and Thomas by the poetry of the 1940s’.63 J. F. H e n dr y What these and other critics have failed to recognise is how J. F. Hendry’s poems precisely demonstrate the problems inherent in relating pre-war surrealism to the inescapably real fragmentation of the material world and of experiences of the Blitz. Hendry is also worthy of further study because apart from his centrality throughout the movement, and unlike the other poets grouped together as New Apocalyptics, the actual bombsites of London became the topography for his poetics of debate. Born in 1912, his nomadic life led him from the University of Glasgow with a degree in modern languages, through travel in the Balkans, to a role as a wartime intelligence officer, before ending as a professor of translation theory in Canada. During the 1940s Hendry published two books of poetry: The Bombed Happiness (1942) and The Orchestral Mountain (1943)

104

Reading the Ruins

plus three anthologies, co-edited with Treece, which included his theorÂ� etical essays as well as a small selection of his own poems.64 The central premise of Hendry’s argument in his first manifesto/essay, ‘Writers and Apocalypse’ (NA 9–15), is that apocalyptic writing ‘is concerned with the study of living, the collapse of social forms and the emergence of new ones’ (NA 9). This curiously non-participatory, observational role given to the writing itself seems abruptly to stop the developing argument, for can it only be ‘concerned with’ scrutinising the ruptures of the late 1930s? Hendry’s answer only comes later; for describing and observing the sickness is a deeply worthwhile act as it also ‘reveals the cure’ (NA 11). Beyond this comes a repetition of the claim that myth is key to understanding man. This is not because he ‘desired a return to fairy tale and fable … but rather because myths control and organise the feeling, thought and action of a people: their function is symbolic as well as significant’ (NA 10). But crucially, and unlike all other writers in the movement, Hendry argues that man is capable of building and apprehending his own mythic frames for living lifeÂ€– even while knowing they are onlyÂ€constructs. Hendry sets against this the ‘machine world’Â€ – with its ‘motor-cars, trains and bombers’Â€ – and also the ‘systems of thought and inference erected on the basis of these objects’ (NA 11). This critique eventually circles into a gyre wide enough to indict Auden, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and others. But it also holds up heroes such as Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Kafka; writers who were apocalyptic, in linguistic form or moral intent, without being aware of it. The dense nature of the prose requires exegesisÂ€– and Andrew Crozier’s brief introductions to Hendry’s work have begun this astutely.65 Crozier’s assertion that the theory and the poetry remained ‘separate activities in their own distinct domains of intelligence within a single project’ should be more closely examined to see if, and then how, their interrelation can be perceived. For while apocaÂ� lyptic writing, in Hendry’s theoretical view, does not take sides in the conflict being fought, but rather continues to ‘note the ever more pitiless war’ (NA 11), his actual poetry performs something rather different. And it is in this gap, between what his theory suggests Apocalyptic writing should do and what his poems actually do, that can be seen most clearly the legacy of surrealismÂ€– and the limits of attempting to turn fragments into coherent forms. For there is a dialectic drawn from his theory that runs throughout Hendry’s poetry, a dialectic that ultimately comes to the bombsite as an elective space of habitation. On one side is ‘myth’, so lauded in the


105

manifesto. This comes in the protagonists’ efforts to arrange experiences, no matter how extraordinary, into a knowable map of the world. Myth is also present through imagery and content drawn from the preexisting grand narratives, picking over Greek, Roman and Norse legends. On the other side is a mass of debris and fragments, the excreta of the machine age so decried. Within the poems this is figured structurally through the broken rhyme and rhythms, the harsh cadences and the mise en page confusion. At the level of imagery these poems are full of disjointed objects, with adjectival descriptions themselves sheared off or twisted through enjambment. But these two sidesÂ€– myth and debrisÂ€– are not posited as positions worthy of merely being ‘observed’, as per the theory; rather, Hendry’s poems of 1938–43 enact the very conflict described. Thus attempts within the poems to form a ‘mythic structure’ amid the language of material chaos provide a repeated dynamic, with success or failure never assured. This can begin to explain the Â�hostility of some critics, for these poems cannot therefore exist coherently as polished objectsÂ€– they rather contain a process, a battle that rolls violently to and fro with no obvious synthesis. And the space in which they fight out this conflict is, predominantly, the bombsite of London. F rom Gu e r n ic a t o L on d on This dialectical mode is first seen in ‘GuernicaÂ€– for Picasso’, one of the four poems Hendry contributed to The New Apocalypse. Here the artistic image through which the pre-World War II bombsite is apprehended foregrounds the aesthetic nature of any response: Frozen in the fright of light chilled skull and spine Droop bone-shriek-splinters sharper than the Bren: Starve Franco stroke and stave the hooves of bulls. I am the arm thrust candle through the wall. (NA 72)

As the bone splinters through neologistic hyphenation to render a ‘shriek’, an arm of action is illuminated. It is glimpsed by candlelight, but it leadsÂ€– vitallyÂ€– to the hand capable of writing. Here the myth of poetic selfhood being created, or rather inserted into Picasso’s painting, works as an affirmation, a response that allows chaos to be seen and orderedÂ€– ‘distilled’ in the second stanzaÂ€– with the hope of a political purpose emerging. A response to Picasso’s work can thus ‘still’ history into a knowable process, similar to the attempt to ‘make a poem’ from the chaos reflexively

106

Reading the Ruins

recounted in ‘Poem for Dee’ (NA 74). The acknowledgement of the debris present, both in the bombsite itself and also in Picasso’s attempt to paint it, leads to a refusal to place a narratival ‘I’ anywhere in the poem. Instead there is a repeated synecdoche of pain in successive stanzas as Hendry’s protagonist is an ‘arm’, ‘spinning coil’, ‘hand’ and, finally, an ‘eyeball blown world’. So it is unsurprising that, by the close of the poem, whose anger is pumped up with exclamation marks, the body logic that attempted to construct the world into a knowable myth can only offer nourishment from a ‘rubble teat’. The White Horseman (1941) is a much larger anthology involving a wider circle of contributors who pursue very different agendas. In this volume Hendry’s own poems clearly refine his dialectic. His anchoring essay restates the terms of the poetic battle but stresses the collective nature of the emancipation that rests upon myth creation.66 Such a desire is then brutally interrogated in his poems. ‘London Before Invasion, 1940’, which opens with sculptural ruins in the aftermath of attack: Walls and buildings stand here still, like shells, Hold them to your ear. There are no echoes even Of the seas that once were. That tide is out Beyond the valleys and hills.67

Here, amid the morose persistence of the destroyed city, is a scaleÂ�disregarding injunction for attentionÂ€– ‘Hold them to your ear’Â€– as shells of habitations are rendered into seashells. Yet it is fruitless; the poet can no more know history, or connect with other wraiths in the city from before the bombing, than he can glimpse the Mesozoic sea that once covered the site of London. The Bombed Happiness (1942) collects most of Hendry’s poetry from the many anthologies and small magazines in which they were previously published, and is ordered schematically into ‘landscapes’, ‘war’ and ‘times’.68 Some works, such as ‘Midnight Air-Raid’ (BH 15), feature the bombsite again as territory to be contested; in others the rhetoric of fragmentation applies, such as ‘The Dead Larch’ (BH 30). The titular poem ‘The Bombed Happiness’ itself is central to this argument, as it seems to offer the enacted dialecticÂ€– debris versus man mythÂ€– but also a crucial modification. The ability of man through his agency to organise external events into some form of sense comes here from a directly renewing organicism in the opening line; a soothing balm is found in a tree’s branch. The alliterative proto-self visible within the poemÂ€– ‘The shy one, wild and wordlessly weaving a way’ (BH 21)Â€ – reinforces the idealistic


107

view that a space can be found away from the ‘white storm of the future’ to establish a personal narrative.69 A ‘breakwater of trees’ keeps the Â�debris of the age away and by the end of the first stanza the happiness seems strangely justified. The organic images grow incrementallyÂ€– with a possibility of a mythic narrative held together with connectives drawn from nature. But while hope flowers, it does not last, and thus the task of the poet is to find language that sanctifies a space for silence: ‘Joys even in giant endeavour crack like bells / despite tongue’s eloquence’. The previous tumult is now fissuredÂ€– and quiet. The apostrophe, ‘O acting dry rot on the tyranny of the time’, which shows this pained and exposed city, cannot be fully countered with the confidence of mythic forms in the shape of a pastoral tradition: ‘O morning’. So while the closing line can be read as either heartlessness or artistic impotenceÂ€ – the triumph of Â�debris against languageÂ€– it also represents how a poet’s vocative man myth has bleakly to recognise its limits, as ‘the silence of the bombed and mad is its own balm’ (BH 21). T h e l i m i t s of a di a l e c t ic In The Crown and the Sickle (1943), the final New Apocalyptic anthology, a divergence between Hendry’s theory and poetry becomes more pronounced. His essay, ‘The Anatomy of War’,70 is concerned with how the war is experienced, with the impact on the psyche of the rapidly mechanised yet disintegrating ‘machine world’, which then necessitates the populace using art and poetry as a ‘social instrument for X-raying ourselves’ (CS 15). But this totalising project of understanding in the essay, which still allows agency of the self, is replaced in the sonnet ‘Debris of Houses’ with a screamed inventory of pain. Anger seeks to overwhelm in the firstÂ€stanza: What brutal simperer, garlanded with graves, Fiddles idiots out to dance upon the maimed? What monstrous bodies, sculpted in these caves, Fill his wild asylums with the damned? (CS 55)

This highly animated danse macabre cannot however confront the power of the ‘brutal simperer’– as the second stanza makes clear. Attempts at finding a way of understanding are as devastated as the physical locale; indeed, through using the bathos of the traumatised domestic scene, ‘his drama rips our dreams like this drooped wallpaper’.

108

Reading the Ruins

The Orchestral Mountain (1943), Hendry’s last volume, could seem a defiant attempt at myth creation. The book’s title grafts the phonic on to natural landforms, creating a place where ‘the hero shouts in the hall’.71 But the structure of this text, in the fusing together of untitled works into a sequence, was to create a ‘symphonic elegy’ (OM 3) for his wife Theodora Hendry, who was killed in an air raid. Here the final exegesis of the bombsite dialectic takes place; the creation of the discourse of memorialisation versus the encroaching debris of the circumstances of a death. The forty-seven poems included in this book, ranging in length from ten lines to two pages, are held through the motif of Persephone, Greek goddess of spring, central to the second and last poems. Three types of debris are here aligned against the construction of myth and therefore a narrative. Firstly there is the direct language of debris. The hopes of ‘find[ing] her here / Forever among the debris of Winter’ (OM 50), of using the action of memory upon organic remains to create a memorial, are swept aside. For debris cannot act as a position from which to memorialiseÂ€– as it is just debris, here slipping away in an assonance that elides the distÂ� inctiveness of words: ‘still branch, sere stick / the shore is strewn’. The singular and still branch can soon be indistinguishable on a strewn shore. Then on a more systematic level the ‘candle’ of individuated remembrance fails too: ‘I too conjure you up through the ganglia … [I] seek you in the brain’s storm’ (OM 20). Finally the images of physical debris are created through asides to descriptions of the bombsite where Theodora died. Laid on to her body the invasive nature of the debris overwhelms and becomes interchangeable with flesh: ‘[a]nd brows of buildings, shelled like pods,Â€/ litter her mind and London roads’ (OM 10). The intimacy of what she lies amid pains further, for it is ‘[t]he blast of outraged space that won her heart’ (OM 35). As the material debris of remembrance blocks the elegy a new subject appears: personal grief. The repeated trope of blindness or occluded sight occurs here too frequently to be justified as merely another strand among the imagery of loss. ‘For this the pearl …’ (OM 35), one of the most sustained poems of the collection, opens with an admission of the problems in forging art from grief. For this pearl ‘stands in the eye of the iris’ and so pain is ‘clear as a tear’. The irony in this internal rhyme, of tearful sight being clearer than dry eyes, means that the prismatic distortion of water, the inability to know and understand the current state, is lauded. While the ‘cataract’ signifies the flood of history rolling back over London, reversing the tide that had gone out so far in ‘London before invasion, 1940’, it also blinds and ‘dissolves sight’. Even the vision of Theodora, that


109

closes the final poem in the sequence, can only offer as restitution the hope that vision in these conditions can perhaps function again: ‘Who’ll light her battered eyes afloat on ruins’. Blindness does not allow a path of self-made myth to be taken or constructed around the debris, now personally murderous, of modern civilisation. The Orchestral Mountain was Hendry’s last published book of poetry for three decades, yet in 1944 the dust jacket of William MacLellan’s ‘Poetry Scotland’ series advertised Hendry’s ‘forthcoming’ The Ruins of ManÂ€– which never appeared. By 1944 the New Apocalypse as a movement was fading and moving towards a diffuse neo-romanticism. But it was precisely the overwhelming circumstances involved in attempting to track his ‘experience’ through the dialectic on the various bombsites of the poems, between debris and myths, that seems to have led to the uncompletable nature of The Ruins of ManÂ€– with its very title suggestive of a bombsite so internalised as to be unbearable. Temporally this runs almost exactly parallel to Gascoyne’s analogous failure to complete his ‘The Bombsite Anchorite’. Both writers reached a point where the attempt to unify the debris of the bombsites into a narrative of meaningfulness, through dealing with it in the terms of the objets trouvés of 1930s surrealism, finally failed. The proposed overarching structure was mythological in Hendry’s case, and theological in Gascoyne’s, but in both the fragment was resilient to explication. Org a n ic s e ns at ions: G r a h a m S u t h e r l a n d a n d Ly n e t t e Robe r t s Most histories of air raids on Britain in the Second World War have inevitably concentrated on LondonÂ€ – as military target, site of cultural responses, and transformed urban zoneÂ€ – and indeed this book is no exception. But other areas suffered greatly, with casualties and damage proportionally higher than those inflicted on the capital. One of those was Swansea. It was the attacks on this Welsh city that first produced bombsite writings and art from two apparently unconnected figures: the poet Lynette Roberts and the artist Graham Sutherland. But beyond the happenstance of locale some convincing reasons suggest pairing them together when considering the effect surrealism had on, and the recourses it gave to, those working in the Second World War. For Roberts and Sutherland directly depicted bombsites in their major works from the war, but both also understood these spaces through various modes of bodily or organic sensations that themselves became part of the works. They are examples of the

110

Reading the Ruins

very British interest in using natural forms, enacting the ‘biomorphic’ or ‘organicist’ turn, as a way to access and develop surrealism. For both figures, the recourse to corporeal physicality is a beginning of a process and not a final point of rest, largely because the subject matter, the aftermath of air raids and their destruction, forces them to engage again with the city, and to see in it terms of the organic forms torn andÂ€transformed. The renewed accessibility of Lynette Roberts’ poetry and prose, beyond a small group of academics and poets,72 has begun to transform the history of Welsh modernismÂ€ – and, therefore, Welsh literature and Â�twentieth-century modernism more generally.73 For taken together her diaries, stories and poems, with their refractions of gender, domesticity, and fears of air warfareÂ€– coupled with their fascination with the material worldÂ€– offer a way of understanding the growth of her unique aesthetic.74 Roberts’ desire to render the experience of wartime fear and horror into forms that she felt could report ‘truthfully’ on what she had seen owes much to an engagement with the possibilities of estrangement from, and juxtaposition of, fragments of experience valorised by surrealism, rather than any doctrine per se. For while the writings of both Gascoyne and Hendry produced over the course of the war represented developments and rejections of the ideas they had promulgated, Roberts had not been involved in thisÂ€ – or any otherÂ€ – literary movement. Indeed, she spent most of the 1930s not writing at all. During this decade she was living in Argentina or touring Europe, preoccupied with her engagement to Merlin MinshallÂ€– ‘the intelligence officer, amateur racing driver and man often claimed to have been an inspiration of Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.75 Born in Buenos Aires of Welsh descent in 1910, she moved to Britain following the death of her mother, studying at the Central School for Arts and Crafts and moving in bohemian circles where she gained a name for herself as both an artist and a florist. But in 1938–9 she began to write, and in 1939 she met and married the Welsh poet Keidrych Rhys, moving with him to the village of Llanybri in rural Carmarthenshire, where, the occasional trip to London aside, she spent most of the war. What limited amount Roberts owes directly to surrealism is debatable; convincing claims have been made by McGuinness for the influence of Mass-Observation on Roberts’ work of the 1940s, through her pre-war reading of Kathleen Raine and Charles Madge, especially with regard to anthropological understanding of strangeness in everyday life through its customs, rituals and sayings.76 But her wartime work also drew significance from the fragment, and the possibility that vistas of fragmentation would reveal a psychic truth.


111

S wa ns e a r a i d After Rhys was conscripted into the Royal Artillery in 1940, Roberts spent the rest of the war without him, continuing to write as conflict intruded into her personal life. It arrived through decrees concerning agricultural organÂ� isation in wartime and evacuees sent to the village, but also brutally appeared when aircraft crashed in the fields and, most importantly, when she observed the highly destructive air raids on Swansea. It was these air raids, coupled with her visits to London in 1940–1, which fuelled a paranoia concerning air attack and vulnerability in her works, which then led to her first significant attempt to depict and explore the sensations of the body. With this in mind her diminutive short story ‘Swansea Raid’ is of great importance. At less than two hundred words long, it is a virtuoso piece of poetic prose, first published in 1941, then revised for inclusion in Village Dialect: Seven Stories (1944). It opens as the heroine, self-alienating through her wartime identity number, stands watching the bombs fall on the distant city: I, that is Xebo7011, pass out into the chill-blue air and join Xebn559162, her sack apron greening by the light of the moon. I read around her hips: ‘best cwt: cl ark’s cow cake h.t.5’ I do not laugh because I love my peasant friend. The night is clear, spacious, a himmel blue, the stars minute pinpricks. The elbow drone of the Jerries burden the sky and our sailing planes tack in and out with their fine metallic hum. Oh! Look how lovely she is caught in those lights Oh! (DLR 103)

Here, as the ‘I’ moves swiftly from being a solid designator of the first person to being that of a numeral in the wartime identity numbers of the two protagonists, there is a rapt fascination with destructionÂ€– or rather the performance ‘caught in those lights’ of colours and sounds in the air raid. Roberts’ later work was often couched in the language of the filmic, replete with tracking shots or wide angles, which is presaged here with the zoom out from embedded quotidian text printed on the sack to the vault of a (menaced) heaven.77 But the slide from microcosm to macrocosm is not as important to the story as a whole as is the tone of the observations, culminating in the vocative exclamations that bracket an aestheticising wonder. This is a scene of destruction that is, however, also one that generates moments of compelling and insubstantial beauty. Further on into the text the scene becomes better lit: From our high village overlooking the Towy we can see straight down the South Wales Coast. Every searchlight goes up. A glade of magnesium waning to a distant hill that we know to be Swansea. Swansea’s sure to be bad. Look at those

112

Reading the Ruins

flares like a swarm of orange bees. They fade and others return. A collyrium sky, chemically washed Cu.DH2. A blasting flash impels Swansea to riot. (DLR 103)

As the staccato sentences build, freighted with their chemicals, no moral position of condemnation emerges. Instead the poet revels in the scene as one of the transformative sublime that has taken the pastoral traces in the ‘glade’ and the ‘bees’ and suborned them to illuminatory and disturbing modernity. The scene ends with a shout of capitalisation, and a burst of light returns the reader back to the farmyardÂ€– but one remade into a zone of terrifying beauty: ‘A Jerry overhead drops two flares; the cows returning to their sheds wear hides of cyanite blue, their eyes glinting opals!’ (DLR 103). In the late 1930s David Jones, another complex Anglo-Welsh modernist admired by Roberts,78 considered the problems of literary creation and mechanised warfare: ‘it is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicalsÂ€– full though it may be of beauty’.79 Roberts attempts this praise by focusing on the individual bursts of light, and not on moral outcomes or choices. Indeed the position of the author is finally one where the zone of sensationÂ€– the body (rather than that of cognitionÂ€– the mind)Â€– is illuminated, analogous to the way that Swansea had been lit by incendiary bombs and searchlights: ‘We, alarmed, stand puce beneath another flare, our blood distilled, cylindricals of glass’ (DLR 103). The recognition of these bodily sensations comes in the original title given when the story was first published in Life and Letters, but a title that also carried implicit amorÂ� ality in its noting of the beauty of flame; the story appeared as ‘From a New Perception of Colour. And I shall take as my example the Raid onÂ€Swansea’.80 S e ns at ions f rom t h e b ody a n d t h e a i r The attempt in ‘Swansea Raid’ to write a history of an air raid through illuminated fragments and bodily sensations exemplifies much of Roberts’ wartime work. For first comes the investigation of how language and linguistic texture could be used to represent the sensations of the body in extremis: hunger, tiredness, fearÂ€– and most notably fear of what might fall from the sky. For Roberts, investigating the body involves portraying experience itself as a gathering of discordant elements of sensations; refusing to privilege a post hoc reworking into a smoothed narrative. Therefore the present tense mode of her writing and the disruption of expected syntactical structure is coupled with a continual recourse to


113

touch, taste, sight and smell as guarantors of authenticity. The language used to represent the colours, textures, smells and sounds she invokes ranges across lexicons in an attempt to be true to the experienceÂ€– encompassing scientific terminology, vocative shocks and advertising slogans. Roberts’ war writing reaches a zenith when it overtly combines these two strands: the bodily sensations and the illuminated fragments. Her transformative power of language, which brings disruption to perception and is authenticated by the bodily sensations of the poet, is allied in a few poems with her desire to visibly search out beauty in the most unlikely aspects. Sensations are the starting point for her 1941 poem ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’ as she takes the aftermath of a London raid and animates the simplicity of sensory repetition through the use of past participles; she ends by showing the limits of interpretation: Heard the steam rising from the chill blue bricks, Heard the books sob and the buildings huge groan As the hard crackle of flame leapt on firemen and paled the red walls. … Still water silences death: fills night with curious light, Brings green peace and birds to top of Plane Tree Fills Magnolia with grail thoughts

(CP 20–1)

This poem is an attempt to find a point of organicist and pensive stasis through simplicity of observation, which can act as a vantage point. In ‘Lamentation’ (1942) a position for ‘thoughts’ becomes harder, as it draws together Roberts’ recent miscarriage, the raid on Swansea and the crashed plane with a dead pilot she found near Llansteffan. An initial nursery-rhyme quality of numberingÂ€– ‘Five hills rocked and four homes fell / The day I remember the raid so well’ – gives way to an italicised inescapability: Dead as icebone breaking the hedge. Dead as soil failing of good heart Dead as trees quivering with shock At the hot death from the plane.

(CP 8)

Even in Roberts’ more apparently simple works the problem of being true to discordant sensory experiences, especially those that do not appear to fit together into the unified whole of a character, remains vital and troubling. In ‘The Temple Road’, written two years after a trip through bombed London, the action of memory is reawakened by the mundanity of paintstripping. The smell of paint melting under the blowtorch transports

114

Reading the Ruins

her from the village back into London. Bodily memory unlocks a causal chain: there was a carpenter at my door, and the smell and the sound of the paint blew into My nostrils and ears, and gathered My thoughts … A week’s devastation melted half the Block with the fury of rising flame throwers. Then to Pimlico I took the bus … I found warm flesh charred … (CP 98)

Roberts wrote in her diary of the moment where sensory experience becomes frighteningly rapacious and can collapse temporal linearity. Her post-raid memory of ‘the round church wet and empty like a grotesque seashell’ (DLR 46), amid rubble and burning libraries, is particularly interesting on this count. For the ‘shell’ of the church invites attention, and offers a way of hearing something that is no longer thereÂ€– as it did when Hendry mentioned a similar experience in ‘London Before Invasion’. It also returns to the scale-disregarding aesthetic found in Swansea Raid, but now acts to materialise and solidify the principle on which the moment is constructed: one experience can unlock, through memory, others that could not have been envisaged. Roberts’ book-length ‘symphonic’ poem Gods with Stainless Ears is the ultimate exegesis of her fixation with the bodyÂ€– as a site of authentic if disordered perceptionÂ€– but it also distils her ultimate fears of aerialityas-threat. This work, published by Faber in 1951 after discussions with an enthusiastic yet wary Eliot, was composed ten years previously, in 1941–3, and itself incorporates parts of earlier poems.81 It makes clear the sweeping breadth of Roberts’ conception of poetry; it is also diagnostic of her relationship to surrealism and the way in which it altered the parameters for non-realist writing in its embodiment of dream sequences into narration. It even shows some of the characters themselves playing at automatic writing. Thus Roberts offers a test case for seeing how Surrealism did not simply diffuse into generalised, organicist neo-romanticismÂ€– pace various critiques, notably that of NichollsÂ€– but instead became the motor, albeit a reflexive one, for renewed ways of considering the violent world. The poem tracks a couple, who are both poets and indeed similar to Roberts and Keidrych Rhys, throughout symbolic landscapes in the war. It eventually sends them away to orbit the earth before falling back,


115

disillusioned, with one returning to the hearth and the other to the ‘mental home for poets’. In the third part of the poem the landscape and the bombers that fly over it are rendered together into what first appears, due to the vocabulary, a Japanese or German pictureÂ€– ‘Embrowns himmel hokushai’Â€ – and which is then animated with alliterative energy and maliceÂ€ – ‘heaves a heavier heart of sedimentary hate’ (CP 56). The scene develops so that all of fauna and flora of the surrounding marshes becomes affected by, or complicit in, the air raidÂ€– before even a bomber is overtlyÂ€mentioned. Wounded, lie heavy in the dishwater tributary. Night falling catches the flares and bangs On gorselit rock. Yellow birds shot from Iridium creeksÂ€– Let the whaleback of the sea Fall back into a wrist of ripples, slit, Snip up the moon sniggering on its back, For on them sail the hulls of ninety wild birds Defledged by this evening’s raid: jigging up Like a tapemachine the coldfigures February 19th, 20th, 21st. A memorial to Swansea’s tragic loss. (CP 56–7)

The totalising and transformative nature of air warfare manages, in Roberts’ work and prose, to turn all terrain into a potential bombsite, ready for the coming conflagration. The linguistic estrangementÂ€– in colours, vocabulary, line breaksÂ€– owes much to pre-war models, but is now overdetermined into vulnerability. For with the knowledge of doom from the air, art transforms how life, together with the words needed to record the sensations of the material world, is seen and lived. Wa r pic t u r e s Stephen Spender wrote an introduction to paintings of bombsites in the Air Raids issue of War Pictures by British Artists (1943). He offered his own reason why these zones of destruction might be so culturally resonant, and noted: ‘In this war, by “War Pictures” we mean, pre-eminently, paintings of the Blitz. In the last war we would have meant pictures of the Western Front … The background to this war, corresponding to the Western Front in the last war, is the bombed city.’82 Indeed the ubiquity of this ‘background’ as subject matter was such that it merited two issues in the Oxford University Press series of war pictures. A year before Spender wrote this sweeping but accurate statement, J. B. Morton had introduced

116

Reading the Ruins

a more downbeat selection of images of destruction in Blitz.83 These volumes represented just a glimpse of the vast number of ‘war pictures’, mostly in a picturesque or architectural tradition, that took the British bombsite as subject. The painting of post-attack city vistas had, however, been presaged in Britain by an anxiety over whether there would be anything actually left to paint. In 1939, in addition to the sequestering of the nation’s artworks in quarries in Snowdonia, paralleling the evacuation of children, the government-sponsored project ‘Recording Britain’ had begun. Artists were sent out to paint, with a fairly great latitude of choice, structures and scenes from across Britain which, it was feared, would not survive the coming assault.84 In late September 1939 an anxious Graham Sutherland wrote to Kenneth Clark, his friend and the director of the National Gallery. Sutherland, rightly fearing the loss of his teaching position, was wondering what the correct path for an artist in wartime might be: should he go to live with his mother? Could he stay in a rural caravan and continue painting? Perhaps he would work on the land? Clark replied to Kathleen, Sutherland’s wife: ‘Why does he think he is serving his country better by digging potatoes than by painting the few pictures now being produced in Britain which have any chance of survival?’85 Paternalism with an ebullient edge also came in Clark’s offer of space in his house in Tetbury for them both: ‘I believe voluntary communism should precede the real thing.’86 In fact Sutherland, like many other British artists, would have a long-term future assured through Clark’s personal project, the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, which was inaugurated in 1939. The committee’s function would be to control an enterprise far larger than ‘Recording Britain’, modelled instead on the ‘War Artists’ scheme begun mid-way through the First World War. It would, broadly, have the task of documenting Britain’s involvement in the warÂ€– but a further aim was providing an occupation for culturally valued artists. Their finished works would be exhibited both as a sign of enlightened survival and directly to boost morale. Sutherland’s particular value as a war artist came from a career that had encapsulated some dominant, and marketable, aesthetic forces of the 1920s and 1930s. Beginning from a desire to emulate Samuel Palmer, nearly all of his work until 1930 had been in the form of fundamentally traditional, if progressively more stylised, etchings and engravingsÂ€ – notably of rural scenes that culminated in his Pastoral (1930). At that time his portrayals of organic formsÂ€– such as the trees, grasses and branchesÂ€ – were abstracted from human habitation and


117

scale. Throughout the 1930s, alongside his work designing posters for Shell, he developed a method that took elements of an organic landscape and focused upon the strangeness inherent within them: gnarled trees becoming demonic forms; looming boulders rippled with moss or Â�muscle; panoramic scenes with sinews of growth pushing across. His work was included in the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, represented by two oil paintings: Thunder Sounding and Mobile Mask. He was circumspect about the overall significance of the movement for his aesthetic, however: ‘My “Red Tree” of 1936 was inspired by a piece of flotsam I saw washed up somewhere. Surrealism helped me recognise that forms which interested me existed already in nature and were waiting for me to find them. In nature lies the key. You see I’m lost without nature; that’s theÂ€fact.’87 Throughout the later 1930s Sutherland’s instrumental engagement with surrealism grew, although it remained resolutely focused on a non-urban landscape: Wales, Yorkshire, Kent. Works such as Picasso’s GuernicaÂ€ – which he saw when it was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in October 1938Â€– influenced his development of more hard-edged methods, including the fracturing of space.88 These techniques were important as they allowed him to render progressively starker and more fragmented compositions; nevertheless, he regarded overtly surrealist processes, especially those with a reliance on dream or visionary logic, as resolutely citybased.89 For Sutherland the urban environment could not, until the war, produce for him anything of a resonance comparable to that which was already in nature. A wa r a r t i s t In 1940 Sutherland’s first task, given to him by the War Artists Advisory Committee, was to produce ‘pictures of damage which may have been caused by enemy action’.90 On this basis he returned to Wales in late August with an extra petrol ration to facilitate movement, and went looking for damage. He found it in the burning buildings of Swansea in the aftermath of the first raids.91 It was no simple task to convert an artist who had made his reputation with visionary explorations of correspondences and ‘the more hidden aspects of nature’ into a time-sensitive reporter, as he himself felt acutely: I had been attempting to paraphrase what I saw, and to make paintings, which were parallel to, rather than a copy of, nature. But now, suddenly, I was a paid officialÂ€– a sort of reporterÂ€– and naturally not only did I feel that I had to give

118

Reading the Ruins

value for money, but to contrive somehow to reflect in an immediate way the subjects set me.92

The tension between his imposed official role and his personal vision did not ever fully resolve; however it was a tension that produced some of the most interesting wartime paintings. With his previous works having been well received by the committee, Sutherland was rewarded with a sixmonth contract and a generous salary of £325. Trips to London to make the initial drawings, amid the newly created ruins, were minimalistic affairs. Armed with coloured chalks, a pencil, a sketchbook and a pass to gain entry to cordoned off areas, he would ‘never forget those extraordinary first encounters: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except now and then a thin tinkling of falling glassÂ€– a noise that reminded me of Debussy’.93 The resulting paintings formed the series Devastation 1941. In it the titles of individual works give more details, occasionally with locations and hints of what the ruin had been before the bombing. Mostly working in ink and chalk, Sutherland depicted sites in central London and the East End between late September 1940 and July 1941, covering the Blitz almost exactly. These works also mark the point where the embedded influence of surrealism, an influence Sutherland had hitherto constrained and curtailed to concepts of estrangement and the organic flotsam or objet trouvé, now became a force driving his idiosyncratic attempts to render sites of devastation as images of beauty. Now the city, as well as the country, could be transformedÂ€– and in being so changed something redemptive could be taken from chaos. In the entire Devastation series what is most remarkable are the quasiorganic forms that Sutherland finds amidst the collapsing structural steel, masonry and brick. In Devastation 1941: City, Twisted Girders (Fig. 3) the intense heat of a fire-storm in the City of London had buckled the steel frame of a building, bringing it down but not allowing it to fall and rest. The flat faces of the metal beams seem frozen, suddenly stopped; an effect heightened by the contrast of light and shade. They are akin to primitive plant forms, and indeed all the artworks in this series rely upon dark backgrounds that suggest a void beyond the immediate focus. However, these particular beams are painted as though they had been alive prior to this new state of taut stasis, their life force curled to twisted tension. Sutherland noted that another of his attempts at drawing a lift shaft ‘torn from a lateral fall … suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix’.94 A differently traumatised organicism shapes the individual fragments of beauty in Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse. Here the stacks and bales contain repeated leaf like or treelike


119

Figure 3â•‡ Graham Sutherland, Devastation 1941: City, Twisted Girders

forms (evoking timber sources for the paper now burnt); yet their repeated curves are now portrayed with ripped and charred edges. Likewise in Devastation 1941: City, Ruined Machinery in a Mantle Factory (Fig. 4) natural forms are shown as vulnerable to the debris that crowds around them. Here the innermost circular shapes, eyelike orbits, draw attention to a central spaceÂ€– but they are trapped and enmeshed in torn metal, blackened driving beams now randomly slanting across the void. The chaos of this scene, of two broken looms fallen into a central pit, is alluded to by Sutherland: ‘at the beginning I was a bit shy as to where I went. Later I grew bolder and went inside some of the ruins. And there were these machines, their entrails, hanging through the floor’.95 A world of machine entrails and wounded eyes is far closer than Sutherland would admit to the actuality of the art he overtly rejected in the 1930s, but in wartime it has become inescapable, and allowed him to find a space for hope or survival. Such a meditation on the transformative effects of blast and fire on object was not limited to Sutherland. A collection of pictures of war damage was introduced in Penguin New Writing in March 1943 with the contention: ‘objects withdraw from the human plane almost to a world of independent existence on the frontiers of the surreal’.96 Such an analysis gives agency to the objects, rather than the artist, but Sutherland was rather more controlling. For in the Devastation series he was able to

120

Reading the Ruins

Figure 4â•‡ Graham Sutherland, Devastation 1941: City, Ruined Machinery in a Mantle Factory


121

isolate small spaces and within them demonstrate how differing materials alter and change. In these physical changes wrought by this alienation of structures from their original purposes, a metaphorical space is opened up, structural steel and brick escape from their urban origins to reveal their origins and become substances contorted for aesthetic purposes. So ultimately devastation gives way to transformation in Sutherland; organic forms bring out moments of suffering that are inscribed on the material ‘entrails’ of city lifeÂ€– ventilator shafts, window frames, collapsed roofsÂ€– and bestow a dignity upon them. Sutherland’s work illustrating Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–42 (1943) correlÂ� ates with this movement towards transmogrification, but it also accentuates the problem of how the human form might be accommodated in these new and violent spaces. As well as painting a design for the cover, Sutherland drew the five images that open each section of the volume. All lead to bombsites. The cover for ‘Personal iv’ has a humanoid figure, walking out into the void, but he is doing so on a hooklike branch of some huge plant, an organic form complete with dominating thorns, that utterly dwarfs him. The final plate ‘Time and Place v’ returns again to organicist forms crafted or taken from wreckage. The standing stones or dolmen hereÂ€– one holding a moon and one a sunÂ€– seem ancient enough. But on closer inspection they are chipped and scarred, and resemble utensils, votive offerings, or stones rescued from collapsed buildings. In this final image, the humans are gone entirely. The cover of the whole volume (Fig. 2) above confirms the problematic place of an individual in the landscape. It portrays hillsÂ€– schematic, triangular and aflameÂ€– but they are speared through by a pen or rapier-like quill. Everything is black or greyblack except for the lurching red flames. The human is subordinated to the wreckageÂ€– all that remains is the scribal possibility in the spear orÂ€pen. A coda to Sutherland’s wartime artÂ€ – and the problem of drawing these overdetermined bombsitesÂ€– came in his works from the V1 flying bomb launch sites at St Leu d’Esserent in northern France. Sent there in November 1944, he sketched the huge caves, formerly used for mushroom growing, where the Germans had stored their rockets, which the British had repeatedly bombed. Here again was the ‘devastation’, but while it had been limited to the architectural in London, and thus could be rescued through organic analogies, here it could not. For these caves included actual putrefying organic matter, actual dead bodies: ‘I’ve never seen such a panoramic piece of devastation in my life … A lot of Germans had been killed inside these caves and there was a terribly sweet smell of death in them. That was really the end of my work as a war artist.’97

122

Reading the Ruins

The bombsite as a space that could be understood positively through a transformative organicism was now a space where the actually organic provided a nightmarish and indelible psychological marker.98 While the particular shape of surrealism in Britain had offered ways of thinking through, or beyond, the organic, other aspects of that pre-war history had implications in the work of those who worked in photographic and filmic depictions of the visual. Thinking about the legacies of the 1930s in this way lets us understand some more canonical figures of Second World War culture, and especially the juxtaposition of text and image; the gap or play between caption and that which is depicted. C a p t ions a n d a ng e r : L e e M i l l e r a n d H u m ph r e y J e n n i ng s By 1944 the film-maker Humphrey Jennings had become enough of a celebrity for his new documentary, The True Story of Lili Marlene, to be promoted in Vogue with numerous production stills alongside Lee Miller’s famous image of Jennings wreathed with cigarette smoke. But this was not the simple result of a picture editor’s commission, as Jennings and Miller had a friendship that predated the war in their times together as part of the milieu around the British Surrealist Group. But when analysing their war works, both Jennings’ films and poems and Miller’s photographs, a point of comparison extends beyond the social and conjectural. For both used the techniques and tools they had learnt in the 1930s for ends that were linked to patriotism, state policy and the rationale for war. ‘See the freakishness of blast’ ran Lee Miller’s headline to her own photoÂ� graphs of the damaged offices of British Vogue, printed in that magazine’s November 1940 issue.99 The imperative inherent in this caption draws the reader to a contradictory combination of fear and wonderÂ€ – and exhorts him order to witness what aerial attacks were capable of creating. Fear and wonder underpins Miller’s photography of the Second World War: and especially her photography of damage and survival in civilian Britain. Even before her travels with the Allied armies after D-Day, where she mixed documenting the revival of couture in Paris with reporting on napalm attacks on Sant Malo, her aesthetic depended upon holding divergent aspects simultaneously in tensionÂ€– notably her career as a fashion photographer and her impeccable credentials with regard to international surrealism. But what persisted were the words she chose to partner her images, and this juxtaposition calibrated how the legacy of Surrealism was most deeply embedded in her work.


123

Born in upstate New York, Lee Miller moved to Europe in 1929 to apprentice herself to Man Ray. She developed her more idiosyncratic visual style throughout the 1930s, a decade that saw her making films with Jean Cocteau, photographing virtually every major artist in Paris, and starting her relationship with Roland Penrose, the surrealist theorist and artist who later founded the ICA. Examples of her work include her sets of solarised images, employing a process of bleaching the negative that she learnt from Ray; the collections of windows, wires and structures she photographed in 1929; and the grotesquely calm image of a severed breast from a mastectomy laid out, with knife and fork, on a plate.100 She also travelled extensively, especially to Egypt but also through the Balkans. In 1939 the London Gallery published Penrose’s image diary of the Balkans, entitled The Road is Wider than Long,101 which recorded a journey through Greece and Romania he had made with Lee MillerÂ€ – and which was originÂ�ally constructed as a present for her. When war broke out in 1939 she finally returned from Egypt to London. She accompanied Penrose as he wrote the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage and then toured the country, his lectures illustrated by pictures of a naked Miller, who was discernable under different kinds of nets and webbing.102 Penrose’s work in teaching how forms and patterns could disrupt expectationsÂ€– to a bomb-aimer as well as a gallery-goerÂ€– continued a history of putting avant-garde art at the services of the British military. The seascape painter Norman Wilkinson was notable for the invention of ‘dazzle camouflage’ in the First World War, and its enthusiastic application, to over two thousand warships, was overseen by the Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth.103 G r i m g l or y Charting the influence of surrealism in Miller’s own wartime photographs becomes a complex matter, as Miller’s contributions to both the British and American editions of Vogue throughout 1940–2 are interesting as much for her ability to turn the mundanity of her subject matterÂ€– new fabrics for uniformsÂ€ – into stylish artworks, as for her developing sense of purpose as a war photographer. In the spring of 1941 she began systematically photographing bomb damage in London; indeed her most significant photographs until July 1944, after which date she travelled to France and followed the Allied armies to the German surrender, are almost exclusively of bombsites.104 Her imagery of the bombsites is inimitable: it is a two-stage process of depicting estrangement from their

124

Reading the Ruins

original state. What she chooses to depict are those objects or sights that have been transformed by blast, but they are then altered again by the captions she gives them. The intersection of image and text, combining humour and the uncanny, was part of a long surrealist visual tradition, international but also British. Home-grown instances would include Peter Dawson’s ‘British Diplomacy’ (1937), where a dead fish is bound to a doll, and Jennings’ ‘Mountain Landscape’ (1936), that consists of merely a photograph of a Swiss roll. Miller’s captions also emerged from the general visual absurdity of a city at war: ‘More Open than Usual’ or ‘Blast!’ spelt out the signs propped up against shop windows when all the glass has been blown out.105 In late 1941 she contributed twenty-two images of bombed London to the book of pictures Grim Glory: Britain under Fire. This volume, widely distributed in the United States and replete with a stirring foreword by the broadcaster Edward Murrow, attempted to give coverage to ‘Britain’s ordeal by fire and high explosive’.106 Miller’s photographs are directly attributed to her, unlike all the others in the volume, and she is responsible for nearly a quarter of the images included, ranging from barrage balloons to fallen angels.107 ‘Remington Silent’ (GG 72) is probably the most acute example of Miller’s tendency to isolate the post air-raid strangeness through close focus upon an object or scene. A typewriter, irredeemably mangled by high explosive, has been placed on a stone plinth. Its black metal body is torn and broken, the case housing the internal workings burst into jagged petals splayed out over the stonework. The return cartridge provides the single straight diagonal line in the sceneÂ€– all others twist: there are curls engraved on to the stonework and black metal strips, possibly torn from the workings of the machine, clutter the immediate foreground. The filigree swirl of those metal bands gives way to the neat and circular keys, these areÂ€– for the most partÂ€– perversely clear, but disordered from their rows and piled up in clusters. No name is visible on the body of the machine, but this is where the caption brings a play on nomenclature, as Remington Silent was an established brand name of typewriter. Yet this instrument has been irredeemably stilled. It is an aftermath picture par excellence, but one where any signs of action have been cropped out of the frame; all that is left is the transformed wreck and the transformativeÂ€title. A visual language of the object being both wounded and transformed was applicable to larger buildings and structures too. In one of the photoÂ� graphs of a chapel (GG 74) (see Fig. 5), the caption gives a distinct steer to the viewer: ‘1 Nonconformist chapel + 1 bomb = Greek Temple’.108 A


125

Figure 5â•‡ Lee Miller, ‘1 Nonconformist Chapel + 1 bomb’, 1941.

mathematically stark equation as narrative shows how architectural value can be apparently recovered from still smoking ruins. The survival of the chapel’s mock Corinthian columns, but now with sky visible behind them, is implicitly lauded; as are the decorative drifts of foreground rubble. This chapel, almost symmetrical, is thoroughly destroyed, with only a tool of rescueÂ€– a ladderÂ€– and a bemused onlooker to give scale and focus. The fragility of the scene and its poised stillness are also apparent: the apex of the arch on the upper left is only held in place by the stone pediment, and the rubble seems to have barely settled. The ideological point made here, and underlined through the title, concerns the transformation of the ugly

126

Reading the Ruins

city into noble ruins. The point is made still more overtly with regard to an image of Burlington Arcade: ‘Since the 1800s the Arcade has been a symbol of luxury and frivolity. Bombed, it achieves a Piranesian grandeur’ (GG 49). Likewise in ‘Baroque made rococo’ (GGÂ€75) the attempt to find value in transformation, through an awareness of aesthetic history, reaches a new height. Here the luxuriant symmetry of a large candelabra has warped and melted, trading proportion for sinister malleability. But the gaze of the onlooker who holds it, and who is also framed within the open window, is one of pride mixed with bewildered acceptance. The caption is for the viewerÂ€– not the participants in the ruinscape. This move to aestheticise destruction could be compared to the seemingly blasé attitude towards bombing exhibited in the work of those such as the architectural historian J. M. Richards. He started an essay by stressing that the lineage of artistic interest in a ruined cityscape, created in the past by ‘[s]torm and lightning, the death-watch beetle, Cromwell’s troopers, the speculative builder’,109 was important as it offered a continuum in which to see the bombsites of London. More significantly, it also legitimised liking ruins ‘frankly [for] their beauty’, and gave a lush hint of the pleasure which came from noticing the scarified surfaces of blasted walls, the chalky substance of calcified masonry, the surprisingly sagging contours of once rigid girders and the clear sienna colouring of burnt-out brick buildings, their rugged crosswalls receding plane by plane, on sunny mornings in the City … In death merit is of a different order, and some of the most dramatic and evocative ruins have flowered suddenly out of a structure no one would have looked at twice.110

However, Miller’s photographs of objects amid the ruins spend too much effort on pathos-laden correspondences to be indicted as truly welcoming destruction. Indeed the point about her captions is their pointed brevity; no languid moral lessons are espoused. In ‘Blast pays tribute’ (GG 76) (Fig. 6) this extends into the afterlife of consumer marketing and brand recognition, industries which were in their infancy in the 1930s. A windowpane has been smashed, the gap now resembling a vaguely humanoid form. But the office with the smashed window was part of a gasworksÂ€ – and the hole resembles the iconic emblematic trademark cartoon of the Gas, Light and Coke Company in the 1930s: Mr Therm. To make this entirely unambiguous, Grim Glory reproduces a dancing Mr Therm next to the photograph, and a surrealist belief in the value of chance is rewarded. Additionally, Miller is aware that even brief titles can convey how the violence of bombing has human as well as architectural casualties. In


127

Figure 6â•‡ Lee Miller, ‘Blast pays tribute’, 1941

her photograph of St James’ Piccadilly (GG 50) the human form is again glimpsedÂ€ – and again transformed, first by bombs and then by Miller. The inside of a Wren-designed church has been blasted openÂ€– but the space is still dominated by angels singing to the newly opened roof and wielding their trumpets. Violence enacted on the church is equated here to violence upon the body through the use of ‘gutted’ in the caption. In

128

Reading the Ruins

Miller’s image symmetry in the organ pipes and the receding tiers of pediment and cornice gives way to the central white space in the photograph, the jagged square of sky now visible through the broken roof. Toothlike projections of burnt and broken beams disrupt the otherwise perfect rectangular hole. Plaster mouldings and fretwork look shabby when compared to the sublimity of destruction; it becomes more geological than architectural. But against the texture of destructions the layered tiers of cherubim and seraphim are inviolableÂ€– as the caption makes clear: ‘The angels raise their trumpets to the open sky’. Moments of hope are outnumbered by a darker humour. In ‘Indecent exposure’ (GG 77) the posture of the shop dummy left in the street is absurd and horrific, but it is not laughable. It is however striking to record the general lack of an actual human presence, rather than its mere shape or copy, in these works. For alongside Mr Therm come the angels (GG 50), the decapitated streetlamp resembling a hat (GG 69), the mannequins gaunt and awkward in the streets in ‘Indecent exposure’ (GG 77) begging to be taken away, the wooden serving-boy pointing the way towards ruins in ‘Step this way Suh’ (GG 100) andÂ€– most strikinglyÂ€– the fallen statue in ‘Revenge on Culture’ (GG 71). This depicts a damaged statue, a rich seam of imagery in the book overall, with the blast-bent sword of Richard the Lionheart by Marochetti outside the House of Commons.111 But here the starkness of Miller’s close-cropped image comes from the black–white contrast, and the violence of the caption is focused on the knife-edge length of twisted metal caught on the neck, as if in the act ofÂ€guillotining. A ng e r a n d t h e h u m a n f or m The apotheosis of this tendency to find the actual human form transformed by blastÂ€– or by the fear of bombingÂ€– comes in works not included in Grim Glory. For in ‘Women with Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941’ (Fig. 7) two smartly dressed young women sit in the entrance to an air-raid shelter, turning their heads to the camera. But both are wearing black metal facemasks for dealing with incendiary bombs. Their ironically blank visages are thus framed and distorted into robotic or alien forms: the entire face of one of them is covered apart from ghoulish circular eyeholes, partnered by a helmet; the other is more of a reinforced blindfold with inset circular sections, these carrying crossed slits for vision. This was one of the trial photographs Miller used to gain full accreditation at Vogue. As an image it can thus be read in the light of the telegram from


129

Figure 7â•‡ Lee Miller, ‘Women with Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941’

Condé Nast that Miller had just received, which outlined the reasons for her employment with a complimentary twist: delighted your wanting to join us stop your intelligence fundamental good taste sensitiveness art values must ultimately make good photogr apher stop sending criticism of your trial photogr aphs 112

Such a photograph as ‘Women with Fire Masks’ was imbued with those ‘art values’Â€– one of those being, in particular, Miller’s knowledge of surrealism. Further evidence comes in her photograph of David E. Scherman from 1942. This takes the distortion of the human form, but especially the

130

Reading the Ruins

face, even further. Scherman is pictured with his camera, gazing directly into Miller’s lens, but with his face totally obliterated by the skull like gas mask. Its trinity of eye sockets and central respirator finds an echo in the circular lens of the camera on the left. He has become both monstrous and camera-like, a determined figure who really now is a camera. Captions, or at least the penumbra of text that surrounded an image, began to matter again when, in 1944, Lee Miller began to follow the Allied armies through France and into Germany. She took photographs of nurses in hospital tents, of the siege of a German bastion in St Malo, the liberation of Paris, the surrender of German field armies, the RussianAmerican meeting at Togau and the discovery of the concentration camp at Dachau. What happens to her war aesthetic with such material? The answer only emerges slowly, as her photographs of hospitals and troops under fire are stark, impressive and largely generic. More subtle problems emerge as she enters German citiesÂ€ – are Nazi bombsites worthy of photography? They were, but with a very different moral imperative: the bombed wreckage of chemical plants in Ludwigshaven are ‘a worthy mess’, but they also give her a sense of awe: ‘acres and acres and tons and tons of steel and glass and things with queer shapes were flotsammed [sic] around in a lunatic landscape’.113 Indeed there is a glee in Miller’s photographs of such destructionÂ€– or at least an implication of righteous proof that the Germans are reaping what they have sown. A short burst of aesthetic appreciation occurs when she enters Nuremberg: ‘This was the first German city or possession of any kind I feel sorry for having wrecked’,114 but it wilts into inchoate rage when she visits and photographs Dachau. Miller’s photographs and writings on the Nazi concentration camps were central to the June 1945 issue of Vogue. Her pictures of the guards at DachauÂ€– some dead, some drowned, and some beatenÂ€– forced the reader into a confrontation with perpetrators rather than victims. But the technically adroit and menacing beauty in the images of their bodies complicates this encounter. Here the violence of the liberation and the defeat of fascism are experienced as undreamt of horrors, and ones that pass, for the reader, from the incommensurable to recognition. Such a trajectory was urged on the public who bought the American edition of VogueÂ€ – her imperative to ‘“Believe It”/ Lee Miller cables from Germany’,115 was printed above the text. Here is the apotheosis of Miller’s captions: having started the war in Grim Glory by coding transformations wrought by bombing as surrealist (to the effect of blast is added the effect of words), they now become a calm pointer with an authorial voice, forcing an audience to believe that the photograph is as simple and brutal as it looks.


131

J e n n i ng s i n t h e 1930 s Making an audience believeÂ€– or feelÂ€– was also the aim of Humphrey Jennings, the man Lindsay Anderson famously and problematically termed the ‘only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’.116 Since then the reputation of Jennings’ complicated body of work has continued to grow; indeed he holds a near talismanic sway as a model of the engaged intellectual, and one who actually got to create meaningful films. Born in 1907, he was a product of middle-class security followed by study of the then new English Literature Tripos at Cambridge. His life in the 1930s was central to surrealism in Britain, as a co-organiser of the International Surrealist Exhibition, author of collages and poems, and populariser of the movement via print and radio.117 Two of the more slow-flowering products of this engagement were his many subsequent years of work on Pandemonium,118 which began with a short article for the surrealist journal London Bulletin in 1938, and became his epic anthology of short texts illuminating the industrial revolution as seen by contemporary witnesses; and his contributions to Mass-Observation, which he co-founded early in 1937 with Tom Harrison and Charles Madge. His principal publication while involved in Mass-Observation was May the Twelfth: A MassObservation Day Survey 1937, a collage account of George VI’s coronation. Collage was also a favoured mode in his work in the GPO film unit throughout the 1930s until the outbreak of war. Questions of what surrealism then meant for Jennings in his wartime work turn upon what kind of legacy it left, but also how he wished to use the techniques learnt to different ideological ends: for Jennings spent the war working for the Crown Film Unit, absorbed into an arm, however distant, of the state. His war films and poems share a technique, that of isolating a fragmentÂ€– of sound, or an imageÂ€– and then juxtaposing it. This technique was focused upon creating or rethinking a British identity, and upon exploring the communalityÂ€ – and revolutionary potentialÂ€ – of patriotism. The spaces where this transformation occurs are, predominantly, the bombsites of London. London Can Tak e It

One of Jennings’ first pieces of wartime work was his co-direction of London Can Take It (1940), a nine-minute piece of effective propaganda showing how, despite nightly bombing, the people of London were still defiant and not ready to surrender. Intended, like Grim Glory, for

132

Reading the Ruins

distribution in the still neutral United States, it follows London through an evening and night of air raids and the subsequent clearing up. The second half of the film, Jennings’ personal responsibility,119 is filled with the kind of redolently wrecked street scenes that had been photographed by Miller: a damaged viaduct reduced to precarious looking parts; the bus blown up the side of a building; heaps of rubble on the street; and a cat rescued from amid the twisted remains of a house. These brief, unconnected and fragmentary scenes, themselves about fragmentation, are held together by the voiceover commentary of Quentin Reynolds, well described as ‘pungent tough-guy … a voice that might easily have come from the mouth of one of Humphrey Bogart’s taciturn anti-Fascist characters’.120 It is this voiceover that overlays the isolated scenes to provide a simple but effective narrative: the brutal absurdities of the sights become markers of how suffering is endured with humour. So the laughter, the woman walking into a shop through the missing window, and the commuters travelling to work on a horse and cart become unified into the wit of resistance. Reynolds’ words confirm and convey this: ‘Doctor Paul Josef Goebbels said recently that the nightly air raids had had a terrific effect on the morale of the people of London. [pause] The good doctor was absolutely right. Today the morale of the people is higher than ever.’ Such a juxtaposition of fragments that both amuse and horrify creates, when coupled to the soundtrack, an apparent unity of resolute suffering. Jennings’ contribution to this film is paralleled at length, and with more nuance, in his most famous wartime poem, ‘I See London’. Here it is poetic form that allows the mise en page juxtaposition of fragments to be aligned and ordered for a purpose. The different parts of this work were written throughout the Blitz in the spring of 1941, from March/April for sections 1 and 2, to May for 3, and they work as a whole to give a view of the city where shards of experience can be unified into a patriotic purpose. As in London Can Take It, the dome of St Paul’s acts as an initial and central locus, and as a synecdoche for the capital’s continued survival. Thereafter the poem unfolds in stanzas built anaphorically around lines of sight, repeating, with variations, ‘I see London …’ This structure cumulatively creates a vision of the city, although it is also one that, especially when compared with Jennings’ poems of the 1930s, offers an overtly narratival and moral position. The first two stanzas attempt to offer a synoptic overviewÂ€– ‘I see London stretching away North and North-East, along dockside roads and balloon haunted allotments’Â€– but whereas in London Can Take It the personified city ‘shakes the dust from


133

her hair’ and gets on with a new day, here there is a far more alienating strangeness in the analogies. Thus ‘the dome of Saint Paul’s’ is like ‘the forehead of Darwin’, and the dawn eventually rising is ‘like a rescue man’. Superimposition of discrete images builds also to give a temporal progression, reinforced as our implied gaze is directed alongside that of our narrator. The incantatory final stanza brings together elements that appear to have sprung from one of Jennings’ surrealist collages of the 1930s. However here their strangeness is acknowledged and explained. They are all presented simply as elements of reportage, brought together by the eye of the omnipotent narrator: I see a thousand strange sights in the streets of London I see the clock on Bow Church burning in daytime I see a one-legged man crossing the fire on crutches I see three negroes and a woman with white face-powder reading music at half-past three in the morning I see an ambulance girl with her arms full of roses I see the burnt drums of the Philharmonic I see the green leaves of Lincolnshire carried through London on the wrecked body of an aircraft121

The final line with its implication of garlands to the victor, or possibly wreaths for the maimed and dead, is powerful but still ambiguous. For this poem, and others like it, were never intended to act publicly in the way Jennings’ films were. Yet in both can be seen the analogous movements of his literary as well as visual aesthetic; surrealism becomes a tool for war work and moral use. De c oda bl e pat r io t i s m The problem of aligning the filmic fragment with a vehicle for a decodÂ� able patriotism is troublingly central to both of Jennings’ most famous Second World War works: Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires were Started (1943). Radically different in form, both still rely on gaining a meaningful structure out of a mess or mass of imagesÂ€– again offering meaning that will convince or influence an audience. Also again in both films it is the bombsites that provide for the differing but complementary conceits in Jennings’ central zone of rubble and fragmentation. These conceits can be schematically understood thus: bombsite salvage as form; and bombsite depiction as content. Listen to Britain is not a film about bombsites, bombing, or evenÂ€ – overtlyÂ€– the war. Instead it is only about an unspecified 24-hour period

134

Reading the Ruins

of British life in wartime. Free of commentary, it covers the life of the nation through images and sounds: factories, concerts (classical and popular), steam engines, horse’s hooves and pub chat. While comprised of these short, apparently unrelated, vignettes, it offers a moral perspective through the juxtaposition of scenes, some of which were reused from Jennings’ earlier films. The depiction of national unity, and hence purpose, is the product of formal technique; for the intercutting in Listen to Britain replaces a logic of juxtaposition with something more artfully effective at influencing or manipulating an audience. Sound and vision are edited using a principle of non-simultaneity, leading to the overlayering of sound from one scene to accompany the visual action in the next. Sounds that appeared diegetic, inherent to the scene and emerging from it, become non-diegetic in the next, and thus there is created a set of linkages that defies any rational narrative or causal logic; rather, they all seem to naturally belong together as part of a greater whole. As Jackson has pointed out, there is no ‘lingering over bomb-damage’,122 thus conforming to Ministry of Information censorship regulationsÂ€ – but there does not have to be: the metaphor of what can be salvaged as a fragment and then turned to war-winning purpose is central. Against this hope the bombsite fragmentation of Fires were Started appears bleakly actual: what kills Jacko, the putative hero, is the final splintering collapse of a building engulfed by flames from an incendiary bomb. The filmÂ€– made with members of the Auxiliary Fire Service playing themselvesÂ€ – concerns a fire crew in the East End of London as it prepares for the night, absorbs a new recruit and then fights the fires that threaten an ammunitions ship. The apparent dynamic is that of a simple opposition: fragments and debris of destruction versus human life and endeavour. But this is a film that is based around welding implausible fragments of characters and skills into a narrative that overcomes class. The new recruit, played by fireman-author William Sansom, is revealed to have worked in advertising before the war, and is taunted for it; yet as the film’s short and terse scenes move towards evening, and the inevitable air raid, he bonds with the other characters. A telling model for this process occurs in microcosm as the exuberant music-hall humour of the song ‘Nine Men Went to Mow’ unifies the crew as they each come in and join the tune. The actual chaotic debris of the bombsites, the overt subject, is opposed by the filmic narrative that shows affirmative strategies. Arguments around duty and patriotism shape A Defeated People (1945), a bombsite film that has been largely ignored by the Jennings work canon. It is a sombre composition that tracks life in the British administration of


135

occupied Germany. It makes the argument that, with her enemy shattered, Britain has a moral responsibility to help. Initially lingering in long panning shots over mountains of rubbleÂ€– and the Trümmerfrauen (Â�rubble-women) collecting bricksÂ€– the film offers an aestheticisation of awe at destruction that is very different from the focused vignettes of bombed Britain in London Can Take It. Children run and play as ‘the desolated landscape provides a dream playground’, but then the mood darkens. The childish laughter turns to glee in the commentary. When describing the fate of the Krupp family, and more generally of the militaryindustrial complex in Germany, our attention is arrested: ‘their war plants have been left a mass of twisted girders. Look!’ And there are the sculptural swirls of steel and piping, the jagged debris. The film’s twist is to imply that the reassembly of these fragments, the remaking of GermanyÂ€– through rebuilding the factories and aid to the peopleÂ€– is in the British interest.123 This perspective is enforced despite Jennings’ own vindictive urges, on which he commented to his wife, moments where he saw in the Germans a ‘purely biological problemÂ€– almost every aspect that we strive to make grow, cultivate, has been bred or burnt out of them, exiled, thrown into gas chambers, frightened, until you have a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul’.124 That the patriotic duty of the British army might be to stay in Germany and find remains of worth amid such physical and human debrisÂ€– and then begin to remake them into a nationÂ€ – is the sombre and pensive climax of the film. This is underscored by recourse to one of Jennings’ well-worn tropes of hope: children happily dancing in a circle, which is taken almost directly from Listen to Britain. Such a lineage shows how the patriotism engendered by the war moves beyond conflict to duty. This duty now becomes the reassembly of a very different, and German, kind of fragment: that of an entire culture. In Jennings’ work such a recondite shard, previously suitable for surrealist use, is forced to serve in various narrative strategiesÂ€– including the resilient desire to hold the wreckage together to find an uncomfortable truth. B a l l a r di a n l e g ac i e s The heterogeneous figures of this chapterÂ€ – writers and artists, a filmmaker and a photographerÂ€ – had complex, partial and varied relationships with 1930s surrealism as it made a transition to British culture. In the war itself their very different cultural projects owed varying amounts to the doctrine that had already been complicated and shaped in the 1930s

136

Reading the Ruins

by the organicist turn towards landscape and the search for a collective unconscious in Mass-Observation. But the legacy of surrealism during World War II meant that approaching and representing the bombsites’ mix of the irrational, messily tactile or uncanny became possible in ways in which the common-sense principles of a social-realist aesthetic could never have accommodated. Moreover, while surrealism opened various aesthetic possibilities, it comes arguably to greatest prominence in the continued presence of the overdetermined yet powerful fragment: the object that could be glimpsed in or recovered from the bombsite, and one that metonymically stood in for destruction and the inescapability of that destruction. Fragments, whether as actual objects or concepts, menace and ultimately become constitutive of these works; and while deeply various, they are worthy of taxonomical attention. Despite being initially understood as part of a greater whole, with its boundaries showing signs of recent violence or rupture, they are also worthy of consideration in their own right as singular fragments, whether visual, auditory, or only accessed through language that has to enact mimetically the process of splintering and shattering. They acquire valence in terms of potential narratives, but also by manipulation by forces into purposeful cultural politics. Perhaps most importÂ� antly, however, fragments returned a consideration of surrealism and its legacies to the city, a space that became a metropolis of shards both physical andÂ€symbolic. In such conditions of possibility, a concentration on the mundane but recoverable fragment in figures as disparate as Jennings, Hendry and Sutherland means a critique of surrealism can figure the destruction of the war as also an opportunity to see anewÂ€– and to explore how a restorative urge would work with the partial and the damaged. By considering wartime culture in such a way this chapter implicitly offers a way of understanding the wider history of surrealism as an aesthetic mode. Such an approach rejects the narrative of growth and decline within the 1930s, with the dispersal into generalised neo-romanticism concluding the decade;125 but it also does not wish to understand surrealism within the war through an unrelenting focus on the activities and schisms within the British Surrealist Group and on the doctrinal disputes between De Renzio and Mesens.126 Rather, by concentrating on writers, photoÂ�graphers and artists who were shaped by encounters with surrealism but who then appropriated it for complex ends, a rather different history emerges. It is hopefully one that can serve to answer Herbert Read’s bewilderment in the postwar period about what ‘happened’ to surrealism in Britain


137

and the nature of its failure: ‘The break-up of the Surrealist Movement as a direct consequence of the Second World War is an historical event that has never been adequately explained … most of our surrealists kept a foot in some other camp, and never fully committed themselves to that “automatism” of creative activity.’127 What is seen here as a defeat and lack of commitment can also be understood as a diagnostic index to success; one that showed how the war years represented the most widespread use of surrealism, a method so open to alteration that it could consciously engage with the external and violent world. Moreover, the imaginative power of associative montage served politicallyÂ€– for stiffening national unity through film and photography; but also psychologicallyÂ€– as a palliative explanation for the abnormal turned quotidian. Furthermore, even during the war a renewed focus on the proleptic aspects of pre-war surrealism grew and grew. For the imaginative scope of 1930s artists could be explicable if their prophetic worth could be fully acknowledged. This process is typified in Stephen Spender’s 1943 formulation of how ‘surrealism, abstraction and so on’ were ‘the reflection in the minds of the more perceptive artists of the volcano of war which had not yet come to the surface’.128 It also dominated how the aftermath was understood. The writer J. G. Ballard arrived in Britain in 1945 at the age of 15, after spending most of the war in a Japanese internment camp. One of his dominant artistic interests while at school in the subsequent years were the pre-war surrealists; this was because of the aesthetic pleasure they gave him, and the sense that they had had access to proleptic knowledge. Ballard’s appreciation of their aesthetic was also comparable to that shown by the range of figures covered in this chapter: for Ballard, too, surrealism was a tutor for how he himself might see the world and write about it: Surrealism had a big effect on me then, and still does. It explained things. Partly it was that war is surreal in its effects: the bus on top of a block of apartments, thrown there by a bomb; the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll’s house, with the furniture still in place. I think I began to feel that Surrealism explained what was going on in England; if you looked at things through the eyes of the surrealist painters, everything was upside down and you got bizarre things being looked on as though they were completely ordinary … I’ve always had a very inquiring approach to everything I write. Most English novelists accept the English landscape as it is, and analyse it and its social relationships. I’ve never adopted this approach. I’ve always been interested in understanding what’s going on, in analysing the peculiar things about England.129

Ch apter 4

The haunted city

‘No,’ she said, ‘stay. Please.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You are safe here.’ He smiled. ‘From more bombs?’ ‘From a lot of things.’

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)1

The pre-First World War vantage point of H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air (1908) extended as far as imagining beyond the cataclysm of bombs and zeppelins. For at the end of this work ghosts populate the futuristic bombed city; ghosts that could be animated out of the ruins. They say there’s a ’og man in Beck’n’am what was lost in London three days and three nights. ’E went up after whiskey to Cheapside, and lorst ’is way among the ruins and wandered. Three days and three nights ’e wandered … then a lot of whistling, shrill whistles, whistles that froze ’is marrer. And directly the whistles began things begun to show, people in the streets ’urrying, people in the ’ouses and shops busying themselves, moty cars in the streets, a sort of moonlight in all the lamps and winders. People, I say, Teddy, but they wasn’t people. They was the ghosts of them that was overtook, the ghosts of them that used to crowd those streets.2

The actuality of the bombing of London was not quite so severe as to create a terrain that would allow a swineherd such an adventure; but after the Blitz the city, unhoused, on edge and shattered, was one amenable to numerous forms of strange sensationsÂ€ – and depictions. The possibility of the phantasmagoric in a ruptured cityscape, which was unexplainable with conventional logic or undepictable according to available materialist systems of plausibility, seemed to many writers a natural assumption. This was especially the case when the shape-shifting actuality of destruction seemed to literalise and release images that were previously purely hidden in mental depth; making the unconscious conscious. For the bombsites as a terrain not only disclose a history, in as much as they expose layers 138

The haunted city

139

of the past, and of quotidian lives, but they also become ruins unlike any ever seen before. They are thus both old and new, linked both to the past and to immediate human pain and suffering; they become places of phantasmal apparitions. The major writers to be attended to in this Â�chapterÂ€– Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and David JonesÂ€– all use these possibilities, but they do so in divergent ways and offer different complex moral inheritances. Kenneth Clark, as well as being key to Graham Sutherland’s active career as noted in the previous chapter, was also involved in the postwar interpretation and contextualisation of other war artistsÂ€– he was, for instance, in no doubt about the presence of the ghostly in the shelter drawings of Henry Moore.3 When he wrote to Moore, to check the titles in the list of plates for a book to be published on the artist in 1950, he came up with provisional, short-hand characterisations of his own. Thus the shelter figures become, for Clark, ‘X-Ray goblins …’ and ‘Reclining figures with ghost ancestors’.4 Even attempts at showing the city as a place of survival and collective endeavour were shaped by a logic of the phantasmagoric. When, in Jill Craigie’s documentary film Out of Chaos (1944), Moore was shown depicting life in the London Tube shelters, it was images of serried ranks of bodies, caught in sleep as if in death, that make up the narrative progress. But the technical effects possible with film accentuated the sense of watching figures flickering between life and death; dissolve shots rendered abject bodies into greying, fading and plaintive ghosts. While Cragie and Clark seemed to find the work of war artists to be ‘haunted pictures’, they were merely utilising a generic language for representations of London’s inhabitants in the Blitz, one that had acquired great force during the autumn of 1940. For example, the Picture Post reportage story ‘Bombed out’ described and photographed ‘a homeless mother looking for a home’ after an air raid. It is written in a romantic horror register, thatÂ€– while partly ElioticÂ€– also offers a frisson of real terror: ‘[u]nreal, with pallid faces, the people of the poorer quarters flit next morning from the interior of the Tubes, the church crypts, the public shelters … early in the morning they glide along the streets like ghosts in a churchyard wind’.5 For the aesthetic possibilities of the supernaturalÂ€– from spiritual residues to uncanny dreamsÂ€– offered modes of shaping physical actuality into aesthetic forms, and making both an interpretable and estranging move. One aspect key to this, of course, was the blackoutÂ€ – the compulsory dimming if not extinguishing of lightsÂ€– that from 1 September 1939 removed the visual markers of modernityÂ€– gas and electric light in various formsÂ€– from the public sphere of the city, and instead submitted

140

Reading the Ruins

shades, shadows and glimpses.6 The optical potential of such a remade city, lit by moonlight and rendered alien, was utilised by photographers such as Bill Brandt very early in the war in several features for Lilliput.7 For Bowen, intriguingly enough Brandt’s favourite writer, attempts to elucidate sensation in such a city required the description of still being alive to be figured as a return or an awakening from death. In her reporÂ� tage she arranges the materials she would then use in her short stories: Standing, as might the risen dead in the doors of tombs, in the mouths of shelters, we have nothing to do but to yawn at each other or down the void of the street … At nights, at my end of the terrace, I feel as though I were sleeping in one corner of a deserted palace. I had always placed this Park among the most civilised scenes on earth; the Nash pillars look as brittle as sugarÂ€– actually, which is wonderful, they have not cracked; though several of the terraces are guttedÂ€– blown in shutters swing loose, ceilings lie on floors and a premature decay smell comes from the rooms. A pediment has fallen on the lawn. Illicitly, leading the existence of ghosts, we overlook the locked park.8

Here the presence of the ghostly is introduced by the near sensation of being in that state oneself. This is not limited to forms of mannered stylists; for the junior officer Gavin Maxwell (before his work training SOE saboteursÂ€– and long before his postwar life with companionable otters) the moment of self-recognition is that of the encounter with the self as emissary from the dead. After one particular raid this apparition greeted him: ‘when I came in I went to my bedroom which had been one of the make-up rooms of the Gas Works private theatre and was lined with mirrors. Coated in the dust of blast, I looked much like the publican whose corpse I had seen removed the day before from the ruins of his pub on the corner.’9 Thus thinking through the phantasmagoric matters, since it becomes a way of giving an index to destruction; but it also provides a way to return again to the body, a form elided in much meditation on the sublime or the architectural as a way of understanding bomb ruins. One of the ways in which it has always been possible to analyse modernism in general is through the broad terms of haunting and ghosting; the plausible writers and inviting tropes were always there, as were the conjunctions of, most obviously, Freudian theory and anxieties of influence. Recent histories with synoptic scope have managed to chart this dynamic conceptually, juxtaposing fears and repetitions, emergences and apparitions.10 Other critics have traced an inheritance from Victorian spiritualism and the political ramifications of presences awakened into the visible or tactile.11 Yet the work of writers in the Second World War brings additional complexity to this matrix. While metaphors of ‘haunting’

The haunted city

141

could be then used to understand the relationship of current aesthetic endeavours to a pre-war state, they could also be directly applied to the scenes of London now encountered. G r a h a m G r e e n e a n d t h e i de a of h au n t i ng In Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) Arthur Rowe, the shabbyfearful protagonist, is both hunted and haunted. It is a novel that loots from pre-war narratives requiring detection, chase and resolutionÂ€ – the thriller, detective and spy story. Yet it also animates them with an irrationally riddling plot, andÂ€– most problematically for criticsÂ€– a phantasmagoric sensibility that might not be just a background effect. For while The Ministry of Fear is situated directly midway between Greene’s different varieties of Catholic overdeterminationÂ€– The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948),Â€– it is not a book that takes religious belief as instrumental or even incidental to the plot, at least not until a twist on the very last page. The non-theological structure comes rather from a remaking of Greene’s 1930s ‘entertainments’, but now with knowledge, and knowingness, of literary artifice: Rowe is at one point almost killed by a bomb in a case of books; at another he cries that the world has now ‘been remade by William Le Queux’ (MF 65). Moreover it is a book that uses guile and guiltÂ€– both as problems for the protagonist, but also as aspects of interpretive difficulties. Their position as flickering constants in the plot, along with the careful use of amnesia, can unsettle the reader in ways that become mimetic of Rowe’s own experience. Greene noted in his journal the brutal details of being an air-raid warden, and contextualised the sensations when it was eventually published in his memoirs. For the horrors of bodies amid the shattered building were such that they gave him proleptic ‘images’ to personal mortalityÂ€– as well as an index of the suffering of others. This is captured in one particular overview where the survivors seem already to be located in a metaphorical as well as temporal zone, named as a representation of the boundary region for mortality: ‘Looking back it is the squalor of the night, the purgatorial throng of men and women in dirty torn pyjamas with little blood splashes standing in doorways, which remains. These were disquieting because they supplied images for what one day would probably happen to oneself.’12 Such permeÂ�able boundaries between the living and the dead, and the images of a personal fate displayed before one’s eyes, seem to give a rationale for sentiments such as these in the novel: ‘“in times of war so many bodies are unidentifiable. So many bodies,” he said sleepily, “waiting for a convenient blitz”’ (MF 188).

142

Reading the Ruins

Greene’s essay ‘Notes on the Way’ for Time and Tide in the autumn of 1940 contains some of the material he drew on for the novel; his postwar autobiography contains other shards.13 Together they explain how the gestation of The Ministry of Fear occurred during Greene’s work as an air-raid warden throughout the Blitz, since he was posted at the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower Street and worked during some of the heaviest raids. Catharsis from such experiences then surely shaped the decision he made, in the aftermath of reading a Michael Innes detective story, to write ‘a funny and fantastic thriller myself’. But, as he admitted later, ‘long before I finished the book I realized the story was not after all very funny, though it might have other merits’.14 One of these merits is that way in which the novel places menace in the midst of the quotidian; it opens with a punning homophone containing an uncomfortable truth. At the very beginning a casual walk leads to a tentative but compelling attraction: ‘There was something about a fête which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly’. This is then repeated with a variation that allows both the childhood bucolic and the sinister to pivot on conditionality: ‘The fête called him like innocence’ (MF 11). The cake he then wins, by guessing both the right and wrong weight, sets the plot in motion: the portable quotidian object contains a microfilm. The novel then twists through the attempts made to recover the films. The porous boundary between the living and the dead, seemingly so capricious and contingent upon chance in a city under attack, is schematised in the grotesquely absurd yet sinister seance that Rowe attends with his apparent friend Willi HilfeÂ€– who then frames him. After the second bomb he is rendered into an amnesiac automaton, recovers in a sinister private clinic, and then, after a series of escapades, eventually becomes the agent of vengeance. When caught in a fitful dream state, and as he is sheltering from both the bombs and his pursuers in a Tube station, a ‘dim lurid underground place’, Rowe has a hallucinatory conversation with his dead mother. In this he firstly states his own predicament: ‘People want to kill me because I know too much. I’m hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me’ (MF 65). But he then explains how such a world can be definedÂ€– and represented: ‘This isn’t real life any more,’ he said. ‘Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it’s not there anymore.’ (MF 65)

The haunted city

143

Rowe avoids such narratival cowardice byÂ€ – ironicallyÂ€ – conforming to the precepts of heroic endeavour laid out in The Little Duke, a tale of derring-do that furnishes the epigraphs to the sections of Greene’s novel, thus becoming a kind of heroic character who, ultimately, ensures that these apparently anachronistic virtues are validated, and that he gains the love of Anna Hilfe, Willi’s sister. For he is now in a melodramatic world, as he confides in the bathetic dream conversation with his dead mother, that appears to have been remade by the founder of the paranoic spy thriller, William Le Queux. He tries in response to become ‘[t]he kind of man the boy he remembered would have become’ (MF 114), thus being, beyond all the other shifting shapes and shadowy spies, haunted by Â�versions of himself. Ru i ns a n d a m n e s i a The protagonist is given a physical location, and with it his relationship with war and survival, by his habitation: ‘Arthur Rowe lived in Guildford Street. A bomb early in the Blitz had fallen in the middle of the street and blasted both sides, but Rowe stayed on. Houses went overnight but he stayed’ (MF 20). Outlasting bricks and mortar, Rowe appears to embody stability in this realm at least. Yet such a location, safer according to the popular belief that bombed buildings would not be hit again, both defines him as a transitory inhabitantÂ€– ‘he was like a man camping in the desert’Â€ – but also starts to set up the correlation between damaged lives and damaged structures. Or rather that his own private damage and remorse, the guilt for the mercy killing of his wife, needs or draws in the stigmata of outer wreckage, as well as provoking the claustrophobic and suspicious life he lives. Thus: ‘an enemy bomber came up from the estuary. “Where are you? Where are you?” its uneven engine beat pronounced over and over again’ (MF 29). It is seemingly searching for both physical and mental weakness. Indeed it would be possible to read Rowe’s travails through London as being continually counterpointed by varieties of devastation around him. But there are no totalising or expansive views. Indeed part of the book concerns the difficulty of moving through a city which was regressing to parochiality: ‘London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns’ (MF 69), and Rowe cannot gain any purchase on a vantage point that would allow him to see or correlate his damage against the physical injuries to the fabric of the city. He is lurking in doorways and shelters; hiding in back rooms and private detective’s offices. Even in the

144

Reading the Ruins

mornings after air raids his desire to see the city is driven by a very particular urge, one that expresses the complexities of the analogy between the mental and physical fabric, and which shows why destruction might be desired: ‘[a]fter a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longerÂ€– it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one’ (MF 22). But enough of the city remains to keep him trapped with his selfknowledge. While neither the first bomb that hits his flat as he is about to drink poisoned tea, nor the second concealed in a case of books, kills him, the second (planted by the spies rather than dropped from the air) does however blow away all of his memories. The bleakly ironic second sectionÂ€ – ‘the happy man’Â€ – is then predicated on the noir plot device staple of memory loss, but here it becomes something altogether more sinister: total amnesia.15 In recovery in the sanatorium, as in the Tube station bomb shelter he hid in, Rowe is again in an illuminated space: but here ‘the sun came into the room like pale green underwater light’ (MF 109). The amnesia initially allows him respite from self-knowledge and guiltÂ€– indeed he is here as Mr Digby. The attempts to read his bomb-blast scars as signs, by both himself and others, appear merely playful. In the private clinic he seems cleansed of his memories, as he explains to Anna Hilfe: ‘People like you have a right to hate. I haven’t. You see I’m untouched.’ Her response gives the lie to this: ‘Your poor face.’ And while he tries to dismiss the scarÂ€– ‘that might have been anythingÂ€– a motor car accident’ (MF 116)Â€– he cannot. For the novel parallels its dependence on the uncanny with an interest in clues and signsÂ€– ‘bits and pieces’ (MF 149) that can fuel decoding and which give the heading for the penultimate section of actual detection. This discloses an actual narrative rooted back in materiality qua materialityÂ€– and not debris as a source for haunting. The signs of a contingent life worthy of decoding come thick and fast. Some are stated as observational truisms: the clue to his actual identity in the sanatorium comes through annotation observed: ‘[w]hen a man rubs out a pencil-mark he should be careful to see that the line is quite obliterated. For if a secret is to be kept, no precautions are too great’ (MF 135). Eventually the truth cannot be repressed, or treated ‘as though there were some healing virtue in simply remaining on his feet while his brain reeled with the horror of retuning life’ (MF 148). When Rowe returns to London he is in definite but still partial recovery from his amnesia: ‘it was a bomb. It gave me this scar’ (MF 163). And while ready to take his part in tracking down the espiÂ� onage gang, he gives voice to systemic and rather lyrical doubts: “When

The haunted city

145

I came to London today I hadn’t realised there would be so many ruins. Nothing will seem as strange as that. God knows what kind of ruin I am myself. Perhaps I am a murderer?”’ (MF 163). The journey Rowe then makes out of London as part of the attempt to corral the gang is both a guided tour of devastation and also a way in which the desire for a bodily analogy for a ruined city comes to the surface as a narrative gifting, meaning redolent, explanation: [A]long the ruined front of the Strand: the empty eyes of an insurance building: boarded windows … The mischief faded from his eyes as the taxi looped round the gutted shell of St Clement Danes … ‘Rowe said I’m not afraid. I only want to know …’ Staring out at the odd devastated boarded up London … The ruins around St Paul’s unfolded; the obliterated acres of Paternoster Row … ‘This is so strange to me. I didn’t imagine war was this’, staring out at the desolation. Jerusalem must have looked something like this in the mind’s eye of Christ when he wept. (MF 166–7)

The thought is given as the narrator’s rather than Rowe’sÂ€– his own viewpoint and extent of self-knowledge has to wait until the very close. For Rowe, still in his post-amnesia state, the matter of reading the ruins in terms of pain and suffering on a human and contemporary scale is difficult. Indeed while still in the car he attempts to graft another, very Â�different, meaning on to what he sees: The ruins from which they emerged were only a heroic back-cloth to his personal adventure; they had no more reality that the photographs in a propaganda album: the remains of an iron bedstead on the third floor of a smashed tenement only said ‘they shall not pass’, not ‘we shall never sleep in this room again, in this house, again’. (MF 176)

The destruction is isolated and put under a propagandist’s headingÂ€– the anglicised version of ¡No pasarán!, the slogan of resistance from the Spanish Civil WarÂ€– as Rowe could not remember suffering and therefore is granted no empathy. The politicisation of understanding the ruins is part of another kind of haunting in the book, the doubleness of treason. G ho s t i ng t r e a s on: da m ag e d bu i l di ng s The extent and totality of destruction to the physical fabric of London in The Ministry of Fear renders any surviving and intact spaces ‘insecure’ and ‘leaky’; unstable in terms of an apparent teleology that will see them, too, returned to rubble. One of the most famous and troubling scenes in the novel is the seance Rowe attends with Willi Hilfe; and here the manipulation of ghosts in the cityÂ€– for political endsÂ€– becomes pertinent.16 Indeed

146

Reading the Ruins

the suspicions that accrued around spiritualism during the war, reaching their height in the 1944 witchcraft trial of ‘Hellish Nell’, during actuality the dumpy and tragic figure of Helen Duncan, who it was feared was assisting the enemy through revealing the sinking of ships and the casualties from raids.17 The clairvoyant as a modernist figure has its own history; in fact the historical truth about the activities of ‘Hellish Nell’ postdates Greene’s novel. But it is interesting to note how the mockery of the ‘spiritualist circle’ that Rowe attends co-exists with a fascination for the permeability of boundaries between the living and the dead, and the impossibility of knowing which side of the binary line some were on. Rowe himself thinks this rather later, when he is on the run, as he who wonders if ‘[h]e [Henry] might not even be aliveÂ€– twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there. That meant nothing, he told himself; the Blitz was newer than the edition’ (MF 80). At the seance the house is already described in terms more applicable to the damaged buildings: the statuary in the grounds are ‘chipped and grey’ and inside it appears that life has ‘ebbed up the passages’ (MF 51). But after the initial awkwardness and clumsiness of the group the activity of the seance, the summoning of the ghostly interlocutor, proceeds apace: ‘Speak louder,’ the voice said. It was Mrs Bellairs, with a difference: a Mrs Bellairs drugged with an idea, with an imagined contact beyond the little dark constricted world in which they sat … ‘There is an enemy here,’ the voice said. ‘Somebody who doesn’t believe, whose motives are evil …’ (MF 58)

The irony of the ‘enemy’ presence in the room is that it comes from the organisers. The apparent movement of a human figure across the binary line of mortality is itself faked, for the murder at the seance that is used to fit up Rowe. The menace of the ‘unsealable’ rooms with their leaking secrets comes to a climactic point when the police corner the ghastly clairvoyant Mrs Bellairs in her flat. Here the physical body of the flat, as well as being abjectly chintzy, is haunted by treason: it could be a place of concealment. Thus Prentice, the chief spy-catcher, gives the order ‘skin the place alive’ (MF 175). What follows is the conjunction of the physical body of the flat, the actuality of the state as a vengeful body politic, and the fate that awaits Mrs Bellairs: ‘Is this your best tea-service, ma’am?’ wincing ever so slightly at the gaudy Prussian blue. ‘Put it down,’ Mrs Bellairs implored, but he had already smashed the cup against the wall. He explained to his man, ‘The handles are hollow. We don’t know how small these films are. You’ve got to skin the place.’ ‘You’ll suffer for this,’ Mrs Bellairs said tritely.

The haunted city

147

‘Oh no ma’am, it’s you who’ll suffer. Giving information to the enemy is a hanging offence.’ ‘They don’t hang women. Not in this war.’ ‘We may hang more people, ma’am,’ Mr Prentice said, speaking back at her from the passage, ‘than the papers tell you about.’ (MF 175–6)

The destruction only comes to a close as Rowe, pursuing his own inquiries through making telephone calls, discloses the full shape of the spy ring. But he tries to imagine what is on the other end of the lineÂ€– were the rooms innocent, ‘Or were the rooms perhaps guilty rooms? … What would a guilty room be like?’ (MF 195). This question seems to be answered in a bleak form of applied theology-as-life that appears as a trace at the close of the novel; the prospects of Rowe’s happiness with Anna Hilfe is predicated upon him pretending that he has not recovered from his amnesia, deceiving her that he does not know who he really is. The need to believe in the damage wrought by a bomb, even after memory has returned, offers the ghosting or division of self as willed, and compounds the bleakness of the ragged and ruined city they are in. Dav i d Jon e s: m a k i ng you r ow n a rc h a e ol o g y In late 1940 the polymath artist and writer David Jones (1895–1974) was staying with his friend and confidante Harman Grisewood. The Blitz gathered in intensity until in one air raid a bomb blast threw a bus through the airÂ€– and into the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘“I was going out to see if I could do anything,” Grisewood reported. “When I got to the door, David called out: ‘Tell them they can’t bring any of the wounded in here. This dugout is full up.’”’18 The language of the First World War trenches is appropriated as a way of understanding the current conflict. The sentimentless ghosts of Flanders shape experiences, even when the front line has moved decisively closer home. This anecdote is telling; for while Jones’ most famous long poem, In Parenthesis (1937), is undoubtedly and absolutely ‘about’ war, it would appear initially that to comprehend The Anathemata (1952) also as a piece of war literature is a case of mistaken identity. Yet blitzed LondonÂ€ – and the writing of London’s bombsites into artworksÂ€– shape and condition this latter piece, and they do so in a way, and to an extent, comparable to the impact depicted in In Parenthesis of the march of the Welch Fusiliers up to the line and the bloody attack on the wood at the close. For to understand Jones’ later work is to track how far it is haunted by a specific Â�traumatic past episode of warÂ€– and yet also how far the actuality of the

148

Reading the Ruins

Blitz provokes a different mode, structure and form of spiritual engagement that could also be understood as a ‘haunting’; and one which he could, with difficulty, utilise in his writings. Jones had a relatively ‘good’ Second World War; relative, that is, to his First World War experiences in the trenches with the Royal Welch FusiliersÂ€– experiences which led to several breakdowns, depression and the resultant semi-cathartic composition of In Parenthesis. For while he spent most of 1939–45 in various London rooms (not all of which he termed his ‘dugouts’) amid the bombing, he managed to work on various fragments of writing or paintings, some of which would be later collected into texts. The publication of his fugitive Wedding Poems (2002),19 which were written in the midst of the Blitz and only shortly before the anecdote recounted above, to honour the marriage of his friends Grisewood and Margaret Bailey, has brought a renewed debate about Jones’ status, merits and difficulties. Now that this work can be set alongside The Anathemata (1952), his epic collection of torn and interlocking texts from the 1940s, itself subtitled ‘fragments of an attempted writing’, it is possible to trace the development of Jones’ method of investigating, bricolaging and recovering language and, thereby, history. Jones’ reputation as a poet rests, and should continue to rest, on his two book-length, digressive and exasperating poems of extreme beauty, and to a lesser extent on his incomplete or shorter texts. These are works of power and complexity. But the religio-academic cult that has grown up around him following his death has meant that his status as a poet is eclipsed as his complexities are removed and his ‘visionary art’ becomes the monochrome quality of smooth piety coupled with a hatred of modernity.20 Therefore one of the tasks in making the argument for why Jones should be read now is to rescue him from his apparent friends, so that he can be seen in all his difficult and contradictory true light.21 But what process of hauntingÂ€– and what structure of being haunted, or shaped by the pastÂ€– is created in Jones’ Second World War works? And what relationship do they have with the actual city he inhabited? The answer gives rise to a paradox. How can a work such as The Anathemata, that seeks to both be ‘out of time’ in its long and complicated view of western civilisation, and at the same time make its readers see time as operating very differently, be anchored and fixed within the precise material conditions of its production? Jon e s a n d t h e g ho s t s of wa r s The preface for The Anathemata gives bluntly factual details of its first composition: ‘it had its beginnings in experiments made from time

The haunted city

149

to time between 1938 and 1945’.22 It was subsequently ‘reshuffled … Â�rewritten’, but the form that exists now, and can be interpreted, is a product of both the ideological debates and the material circumstances of composition within the Second World War. Jones’ position with regards to the conflict was complex: his fascist sympathiesÂ€ – both aesthetic and politicalÂ€– have long merited comment, obfuscation and other forays into the disputable terrains of interwar, anti-modern spirituality.23 Even Grisewood commented that the Chelsea group of theologians and writers, of which he was a key member, were ‘avant garde in a rightist, Catholic, European style’,24 and the array of evidence from the letters and the poems circulated in manuscript seems compelling. But what oppositional positionÂ€ – against a war of plutocracy and the ‘technology of modernity’– was then open to him? In his 1941 article entitled ‘Religion and the Muses’, Jones appeared very clear about what could, and could not, be glimpsed in wartime from the arts: It is necessary to have in mind the position of our epoch on what may be called, for convenience, the graph of history. For the relationship between what the Church wants for her use, and the characteristic art of any given epoch, will determine what sort of art is available for the Church’s requirements.25

All the tropes of Jones’ prose and poetry are here: the desire for a visual corollary; the circumlocutions; the unadorned singularity of the aesthetic product. It is a way of thinking he continued for the rest of his life. But ‘Religion and the Muses’ is also interesting as it shows how the pressures of war came to bear on his thinking, prose, and finally poetry. After surveying the scene of horror and destructionÂ€– none specified, all alluded to only through metaphorÂ€– it concludes with an apologia: [‘I]t is, after all, a bit of a hornet’s nestÂ€– certainly a place of booby-traps, that we are investigating … Finally I would repeat that as far as I can see we like all men are forced into guerrilla tacticsÂ€– we operate in a terrain over-run by the enemyÂ€ – and pretty efficiently administered by him.’26 What sort of guerrilla tactics for the creation of art are then present in The Anathemata? Understanding how far Jones is depending in 1940 on Â�echoes of 1914 has become a critical commonplace; Jones himself did not shy in ‘Prothalamion’, one of the newly discovered ‘Wedding Poems’, from situating all his efforts in such a light: So have I heard bird-song beneath the trajectory zone, at Passchendaele, or seen flowers lean toward each other, under the sun that shined to delineate the hate and mutilation of the Forward Area.27

150

Reading the Ruins

Critics have noted how the presence of contemporary wars and rumours of wars pressurises the later work more indirectly, and have analysed this process well. Neil Corcoran claims, convincingly, how the air raids on London acted as the ‘proximate crisis’Â€ – analogous to the attack which closes In ParenthesisÂ€– that sparked the writing of The Anathemata. But then there are also the deep analogies, the continual desire not to see the terrain of London from the perspective of an anti-Nazi guerrilla, but as a tragic recapitulation of 1914–18 in mythic terms: (O Balin O Balan! â•…â•…â•… how blood you both the Brudersee â•…â•…â•… towards the last pháse of our dear West.)

(A 115)

These figures, drawn from Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and locked in a fratricidal conflict, are analogues for Britain and Germany. Indeed, as Corcoran says, it depicts ‘his sudden slide into the language’Â€– or almost the language, for Brudersee is a Jonesian neologismÂ€– ‘of the enemy [one] who is also, racially, “a brother”’.28 The echoes continue, stretching back to ‘the sweet Brothers Balin and Balan / embraced beneath their single monument’ at the close of In Parenthesis; and include one of Jones’ wartime paintingsÂ€– Epiphany 1941: Britannia and Germania EmbracingÂ€– which shows the persistence of his ambivalence towards the conflict at best. There is nothing as unambiguous as this in The Anathemata; for while the iconography of war continues to make its presence felt, any direct reference to the contemporary situation is muted, complex and shieldedÂ€– as it also is in Jones’ essay ‘Art in Relation to War’ (1942–3). Both texts were formed by the desire to take the longest of long (mytho-poetic) views. War is thus also dimmed to near obscurity, and veiled through layers of abstraction, as a point of reference for the intellectual ideas within The Anathemata. Yet it is certainly there in another formÂ€– in the structure of its compositionÂ€– the way this text plays with traces, debris and objects. These act directly as a corollary to the specifically haunted cityscape of London; and, moreover, the very materiality of the poemÂ€– in its use of footnotes and of illustrations – is a way of showing this. T r ac e s, t e x t u r e s a n d e x pa ns i v e n e s s The very first line of Jones’ preface to The Anathemata offers a source and precedent that could explain and authenticate the unstable yet totalising

The haunted city

151

nature of the work: ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find’ (A 9). Here the poetics of gathering words as physical traces or tactile objects becomes explicit. Yet this quotation and claim, coming with a disclaimer that flaunts the lack of definitive ur-source provenanceÂ€– from ‘Nennius, or whoever composed the Historia Brittonum’Â€ – also reveals the contingency embedded in Jones’ project. For what might be in a heap that encompasses ‘all’? And how do you find what you ‘find’? The Anathemata attempts to answer these questions by building a scaffolding of eight discrete sections, roughly holding in place a magisterially chaotic and vast structure, in which linear movement through the text means both following the act of the sacrament but also criss-crossing Europe and the Holy Land; employing textual experimentation and multiple languages. It traces human history and the particular traditions of spirituality converted into art, man’s sign-making and sign-shaping; but it also serves itself as an AnathemataÂ€ – that is, an object sanctified for holy useÂ€– and is thus also itself an artefact. Jones attempts to capture the desire, and the demands then placed on the reader: So I mean by the title as much as it can be made to mean, or can evoke or suggest, however obliquely: the blessed things that have taken on what is cursed and the profane things that somehow are redeemed: the delights and also the ornaments, both in the primary sense of gear and paraphernalia and in the sense of what simply adorns; the donated and votive things, the things dedicated after whatever fashion, the things in some sense made separate, being ‘laid up from other things’; things, or some aspect of them, that partake of the extra-utile and the gratuitous; things that are the sign of something other, together with those signs that not only have the nature of a sign, but are themselves, under some mode, what they signify. Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods. (A 28–9)

The resultant tracking, zooming and jump cutting in the text can be read, as emphasised by Jones’ dedicated scholar cliques, as being due to a grand Splengerian narrative: celestial patterns or multiple concentric rings. Or it could rather be, as Jones himself claimed, an accidental chain of selfdirecting significance and echo: ‘Part of my task has been to allow myself to be directed by motifs gathered together from such sources as have by accident been available to me and to make a work out of those mixed data’ (A 9). Such a work makes demands on readers, and begs from them questions of what the act of reading might be for. Critiques of the poem have reflected this, dating back to the mauling it was given in the last issue of Scrutiny in 1953, where it was dismissed as ‘a new (Roman Catholic) Waste

152

Reading the Ruins

Land by a new (London Welsh) T. S. Eliot’.29 Part of such a critique was a generalised attack on modernism per seÂ€– but part was, as has ironically been noted, an assumption that such a work as Jones’ was ‘guaranteed genuineness’ by ‘the unmistakeable odour of its centrality’.30 Such an odourÂ€– while pungent at the timeÂ€– did not last; and the history of reading late Jones has been a troubled one. Against various venerations of In Parenthesis the ‘systemic poetic failures’ of The Anathemata have been enumerated in various ways, by various critics, and for variousÂ€– sometimes contradictoryÂ€– reasons. One of the first moves is through comparison: The Anathemata does not have quite this sort of balance [present in Pound]. Its warm baths of ethnological wandering and linguistic movement leave us in waves of association that are, in their fashion, alive … As a sequence it is too laden with its layers of treasured cultural meaning and the sting of the personal is missing.31

The apparent problems discerned here in Jones are emblematic of the ideological mission for this book as a whole, a veneration of the artifice of ‘the personal’; but these critics are far from alone in not having a language in which to engage with the multiple ‘layers’ of meanings that Jones’ poem wishes to display palimpsestically together. For while The Anathemata, in being directed by motifs and echoes, continually oscillates between lucky-dip randomness and inclusivity, it never directly refers to contemporary London, and does not require an anchor in the contemporary for its slow-forming pattern. Moreover, while the tangential nature of Jones’ annotations implies a breadth of reference, with their tone of earnest hopefulness, this is held in place by the re-emergence of patterns that corral and frame all knowledge. So the poem begins and ends with the service of the Eucharist, with the liturgical words seemingly momentarily interrupted, as the chalice is raised, by the entire poem. By using this particular service as a frame, Jones restates the link between language and physicality, showing how a form of words can alter objects: ‘[w]e already and first of all discern him making this thing other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes’ (A 49). This transformative ‘othering’ of a ‘thing’, offers a thematic lead. For the weight of notes and guidance for a reader shows a project of rescuing not only historical and mythic knowledge, but also the material form, the actual words, in which such knowledge was couched. The project of salvage means the cataloguing of specificity; and so the poem is cloyingly filled with proper nouns, tying action or memory down to places. The importance of locale is one facet of this. Nevertheless, the journey

The haunted city

153

between such locales is given equal weight. Jones’ history has to be traversed through multiple sea voyages, harbour carousing or sales of merchandise which all act to link language (and human subjects) back to place, and the quest motif is an index to this. When the Mediterranean is left behind, the return to London comes as a homecoming for men whose identity is given by location: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Coming up on a spring tide with her Rotherhithe mate and her Limehouse skipper and a Sittingbourne bred pilot in her conning-house â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… his flag on the blow …

(A 137)

The tales of these shipmates, in the fragments that follow, range back over weapons used, ports visited and myths told. Yet, amid the memories of blanking ‘night-drench of the white spindrift’, order and rhythm is preserved. Jones does not use diacritical marks to guide, but his combination of a tightly interlocking hemstitch and parentheses in the mise en page gives emphasis. Italics shows contrasts while constant cribs to pronunciÂ� ation mean that a reader is ushered through the marvels in a manner that is semi-coercive. Attentive silent reading won’t work, as Jones assumes in his rationale for the apparatus: ‘[t]he notes, because they so often concern the sounds of the text, and are thus immediately relevant to the form, are printed along with it’ (A 43). Recovery is only complete when the words are spoken again. The Anathemata repeats the conception of language as, foremost, a physical thing that has to be continually rescued and thus performedÂ€– and this offers an acute contrast with Jones’ Wedding Poems. These were poems written in the midst of the Blitz and labelled with their very hour of completion, for example the much shorter and ostensible romantic ‘Prothalamion’ was ‘written between 10.30 and midnight on Thursday Sept. 12th, 1940. 61 King’s Road Chelsea, SW3’.32 This specificity was part of the textual apparatus for their presentation as giftsÂ€– but it also overtly freezes the encounter with history into this moment of despair in ‘flamelap and split masonry’. The longer ‘Epithalamion’ gives a grand sweep of history, seen through a succession of beautiful women culminating in the bride, but it is tightly linear: a glassy and glossy stepping down to the debased age of wartime. The immediate actuality of bombed London cannot give anything apart from fear and wreckage to poetry; interpretÂ� ation of the shattered city as revelatory would have to wait until the postwar years and The Anathemata.

154

Reading the Ruins

Wedding Poems also act as a lesson to demonstrate Jones’ ideolÂ�ogical sympathies; a point left out of Dilworth’s notes, but forcefully made in some reviews of the volume.33 Among the jagged points of semiPoundian historical analysis is the directly causal relationship implied in ‘Promithalion’, of a descent to war due to a situation where ‘fear and bombast pretend to be competence / Because of the detestable counsel, directly / because of the merchants rule’. The polyvalenced and fragmentary nature of The Anathemata saves it from such reductive didacticism, but perhaps only because, as William Wootten suggests, ‘mythic timelessness would be made to accord with Christian Incarnation and eschatology, conventional history and Spengler’s Decline of the West. No easy task clearly.’34 Yet such a reading, locating the success of The Anathemata as due to the way an unpleasant ideological position is muted by the poem’s tangled length, seems not entirely fair. For what is constructed through fragments in the poem is a project of understanding the pliable materiality of salvaged language, of seeing just how ‘the phases and the phase-groups / sway toward and fro within that belt of latitude’ (A 62). G ho s t s i n t h e f o o t no t e s The cult of the footnote-heavy modernist long poem is an interesting one, full of learning and rebarbative nuance; it abounds with textual pleas for authenticity and the economics of binding small volumesÂ€ – pace Eliot’s addition of anti-illuminating elucidation to the first book edition of The Waste Land.35 In In Parenthesis Jones had also used notes, butÂ€– again in Eliot’s fashionÂ€– had placed them at the rear of the work. The notes in The Anathemata are doing something rather different, and they are central to establishing through the actuality of the mise en page the palimpsestic layers and the detail of how this text might be said to be haunted; that is, a work and a space where historical patterning leaves any artwork contingent and to be read through its predecessors. The preface tries to explain and give a rationale for this. For while the notes are printed in a synchronised fashion to assist and aid punctuation, and thus to help with questions of the vocalised text, they are not there for any form of conventional ‘reference’Â€– an aspect Jones himself stresses: I have a last point that I wish to get clear. Although in the notes to the text and in this apology I refer to or cite various authorities and sources, that does not mean that this book has any pretensions of a didactic nature … I refer to them only as a traveller might, in making a song or a story about a journey he had taken from his home through far places and back. (A 42)

The haunted city

155

Instead there are a number of hauntings that occur through this bifurcation of the reader’s gazeÂ€– hauntings that are ideological as well as uncanny. Firstly comes the linguistic, an etymology to anything of possible contention is provided, since Jones stresses repeatedly how a contemporary and debased language cannot represent its own history, the layers of that usageÂ€– and how that usage has altered the words themselves. Concepts of language itself as a utile object, shaped and thus burnished by time and use, lurk not far beneath this: as is shown in the continual elucidation of the history of places: ‘The Roman name Marianus gave Merion in Welsh; hence “Merioneth”’ (A 112). This leads towards the theological import of the notes, the repeated discovery of patterning in language that allows the discovery of patterns in human thought, action andÂ€– most importantlyÂ€– belief. This can be seen where the decisiveness of the poem, ‘when we put up rejoicing candles bright / when we pay latria / to the Saving Wood’ (A 165), has to be shown in historical and theological lines of descent from Scripture and the iconography of the cross in a note that takes up nearly half of the whole page. This religious unpicking also occurs when concepts of the ‘utile’ are tested against the limits of ‘dictionary’ definition (A 65) and found wanting, thus requiring Jones’ own gloss. Lastly the notes offer, in mise en page terms, a basic but mimetic visual form of mapping the strata: they, literally, lie beneath the ruins, ideas, towers and language both used and described. Moving beyond the simple resonances of place namesÂ€– from rivers, to building, to individual stones and hedgesÂ€– this additionally begins to give a physical corollary to the mental endeavours the reader has been asked to perform. The notes’ reliance on using maps as the ultimate source of positioning (of the reader and of the poem), and thus authentication of the locale, is part of this. In the note to ‘Rite and Fore-time’ concerning Arthur, the repeated questioning in the poem is ultimately met with: If the hunt of the boar Trwyth by the men and dogs of Arthur described in the tale of Culhwch is read with one eye on the Ordnance Survey’s map, the Distribution of the Megaliths (sheet 7), the possibility of some connection between … this great mythological hunt and the sites of the megaliths may suggest itself. (A 80)

The footnotes offer such an expansive and multifold form of haunting; a movement from Jones’ memories of Jerusalem to details of bear-cult venerations over only a few pages. But together they give the poem an expansive hinterland, and validate the idea that to be haunted is to be in, and of, history. Yet the specifics of being haunted or shaped by blitzed London come to the fore in another aspect.

156

Reading the Ruins Ac t s of r e c ov e r y

These layers of materiality become truly palpable when the book as a whole is considered. For interleaved within the chapters, bearing no direct relationship to the specific parts of the poem next to which they appear, are illustrations and examples of Jones’ calligraphy. They both emerge from the textÂ€– and offer a commentary upon it. These inscriptions, nearly all Latinate phrases or parts of prayer, counterpoint the broader narratival sweeps as the text obsesses over rescued fragments and words. The idea of the archaeological imagination at work in Jones is something that has been noted before. Louis Bonnerot remarks on the way in which Jones uses an archaeological lexis, where the purpose of the text is ‘to use fragments, under analogical names such as vestiges, deposits, strata, as witness of, and concerning, links with the past’.36 Descriptions of the unearthed phrase as the agent which collapses historyÂ€– and so links together all wars in a fashion inherited from SpenglerÂ€– matches up to the inclusion of these illuminated inscriptions, making the text seemingly to enact the messy process of recovery. The list helpfully given to the illustrations shows that they were not all composed specificÂ� ally for this text; rather they range from 1931 onwards and use a variety of media (A 7)Â€– thus implying a degree of choice that acts as a personal rummaging in the rubble of an archive. The method Jones used to make these various inscriptions, taking techniques from his mentorÂ€ – the Catholic commune founder, engraver and scriptophile Eric GillÂ€– adds to the general effect. These inscriptions seem to be partially broken, moss-coated, lovingly saved, with the controlled layers of murk lifting like an internal horizon on ‘north mens / thing made’ (facing A 54), or the scrawled marksÂ€– of a pseudo-trowel?Â€– on ‘roma caput’ (facing A 127). The illuminated wood-engraving ‘He Frees the Waters’ (facing A 213) is unfinished but captures the fragility of the fragmentÂ€– as in the left-hand broken edge that both frames the scene and implies a lost or damaged greater whole. Yet the patina of ersatz dirt from apparently physical objet trouvés and the counterfeit archaeological frisson fashioned by these works is a product of careful creation, the nuanced application of gouache and colour wash. The fragments of writing cannot disclose the contemporary shattered city, London, where they were composedÂ€– but they can be held next to materÂ� ials that might seemÂ€– and be seenÂ€– to have emerged from the wreckage. This integration of word and image in such a relationship does however serve a wider philosophical purpose in stabilising the text, when set against the opening dedication’s threat of infinite regress: ‘It was a dark

The haunted city

157

and stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall; it was said to the tale-teller, tell us a tale, and the tale ran thus: it was a dark and stormy night …’ (A 45). The possibility of the entire work as merely the trickery of mise en abyme, telling stories about telling stories about telling those mythic stories ad infinitum, is stopped and earthed by the integration of these illuminated manuscripts. The ‘heap’ of salvaged fragments has become an organised structure where form and content, if they do not cohere then they, at least, mesh and so are more artfully held than the dissembling of Jones’ notes on contingency would admit. The uses Jones makes of the material presence of the Second World War, both to animate and to authenticate, is predicated on both the recovery of a pastÂ€– be it in textual objects or sensations from FlandersÂ€– but also on the transformation of such matter. ‘Epithalamion’, one of his wedding poems, acknowledges the effort of such remaking; but it also acknowledges the process of how the poignancy of depicting London can become most vividly visible when the recovered cultural object, and the physical trace of destruction, are one and the same. The poem ends: The tactical withdrawals are explained at considerable length, the jokes wear thin, the truth is poking here and there. Perhaps London Bridge is broken down broken down, broken down broken down.37

B ow e n’s g ho s t s When completing her retrospective novel, with a fictionalised Blitz as a background, the ghosts that had populated Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short stories still had potency. In The Heat of the Day (1949), she dramatised their progress through the city as the ‘uncounted’ London dead: Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presenceÂ€– not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s livingÂ€– felt throughout London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses … Absent from the routine which had been life, they stamped upon that routine in their absenceÂ€– not knowing who the dead were you could not know which might be the staircase somebody for the first time was not mounting this morning, or at which street corner the news vendor missed a face, or which trains and buses in the homegoing rush were this evening lighter by at least one passenger.38

158

Reading the Ruins

The deferral of the verb in the first sentence makes this passage particularly unsettling; what the dead will do is itself unknown until their ‘presence’ in the text, as well as within London, is unambiguously ‘felt’. The Heat of the Day knows a lot about the uncanny, coincidence, abject pieces of paper and the apparitional cityscape. Yet it is held taut as the web of relationships within work out the balancing acts of intelligencing and counter-intelligencing; surmising clues and remaining oblivious or naive. Such complexities of form within the novel, used as a way to capture a city transformed by war, are one of the reasons why Bowen has become a key figure in the renewed critical interest in Second World War literature. The recent readings have been pertinent and expansive: whether understanding of the love triangle in The Heat of the Day as metaphoric for British relations with Ireland; or analysing the mapping of blackout spatiality.39 These efforts have been part of a wider interest in the writer, and various recent works have framed Bowen in differing terms: an Irish writer; a proto-post-modernist; a psychoanalytical case study herself; or primarily an agent of dismembering all certainties of the novel.40 But it is to Bowen and the Blitz that this chapter turnsÂ€– and the relationship of her ghosts with the ruins. Dissections of Bowen’s works are inevitably attuned to the supernatÂ� ural, and the fact that while her fiction is not on first glance overpopulated by ghosts, the ‘ghostly’ or uncanny is present as a pressure or a sensation behind many moments of speech and quietÂ€ – and between action and reflection. The inadequacy of ‘haunting’ as a way of understanding unease and the uncanny in Bowen’s work is a given: but it also has to serve as a point of departure. So to write breezily of Bowen’s wartime ghosts is, at the same time, too prescriptive and too essentialist; her wartime versions of haunting stem from divergent and, themselves haunted, traditions. Roy Foster tracks Bowen’s Irishness as being systematically displayed through her negotiations with particular tropes and traditions of the Irish Gothic, even if this is displayed most overtly in her introductions to other works, notably to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas in 1947.41 The limping survival into the 1930s of the specific cultural matrix of the Protestant Ascendancy, with houses such as Bowen’s own Bowen’s Court, brought with it a highly pressurised reservoir of formsÂ€– and anecdotesÂ€– that could be grouped into a political unconscious, or read as such in artworks. In works such as the short story ‘Her Table Spread’ (1937) the apparitional objects of contemporary Ireland can be understood as the spectral traces of imperial rule. In this work the Royal Navy destroyer riding at anchor out in the bay sails away at the end as if it had never

The haunted city

159

entered, leaving shock, aftermath and traumatic traces behind.42 While in a story such as ‘The Back Drawing Room’ (1926) the outlines of what is visibleÂ€ – and what is apparently gone or burntÂ€ – start to blur; and the figures of the Ascendancy areÂ€– as the visiting cyclist later realisesÂ€– to be only now ghosts. There is no ‘queer forboding’ and, even though the story is being retold in a London drawing room, the haunting persists and is passed on. The unfinished phrase ‘that illustrates exactlyÂ€–’ shows how these forms cannot, ironically, be so illustrated.43 Yet alongside the specifically Irish dimension must come her interests in ghosts as being avatars or disclosers of modernity itself, indexes to the complicated business of being alive in a technological world. As she wrote herself in an introduction to a collection of supernatural stories: ‘On the whole, it would seem they [ghosts] adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditionsÂ€– they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another.’44 Therefore, in various pre-war stories the mundanity of being modern becomes, through its objects, a way for them to ‘set up house’, quite literally in some cases. In ‘The Cat Jumps’ (1934) the grisly Harold-Wright family’s state of being so ostentatiously modern as to be open to parodyÂ€– ‘they had light, bright, shadowless, thoroughly disinfected minds’45Â€ – still ends up in a scene of horror. For despite having ‘Krafft-Ebbing, Freud, Forel, Weiniger and the heterosexual volume of Havelock Ellis’ on the shelf in their weekend cottage they cannot, or do not, take the irrational seriously. Notwithstanding being ‘fortunate in their mentality’ they cannot credit the immediate and murderous past as having an effect upon their livesÂ€– that is, not until from underneath the newly repainted walls something moves and attacks. In ‘Making Arrangements’ (1925) some dresses being packed up to be sent to the runaway wifeÂ€– standing in for her in their shimmer and wanton poise, ‘a creamy, slithery thing with a metallic brilliance’Â€ – are attacked by the cuckolded husband; and in the text’s lacunae, as he destroys them, something both terrifying and vengenceful occurs. Then all that remains are scraps and fragments, ‘a wraith of flame-colured chiffon’ and ‘something black and snake-like lying across the threshold’.46 The ghostly presence of reminiscence has been converted into something savagely malign. T h e t e r r i t or y of t h e c i t y Bowen’s postscript to the US edition of The Demon Lover and other Stories (The Mulberry Tree, 1945) has rightly become a classic of Blitz

160

Reading the Ruins

writingÂ€– explanatory, careful, excited, and unafraid to encounter strangeness through sensations. The justification for capturing the uncanny as lived experience is here; as is her justification in understanding, in retrospect, the stories as emerging from a spatial rather than temporal zone: These are, more, studies of climate, war climate, and of the strange growths it raised. I see war (or should I say feel war?) more as a territory than as a page of history: of its impersonal active historic side I have, I find, not written. Arguably, writers are always slightly abnormal people: certainly, in so-called ‘normal’ times my sense of the abnormal has been very acute. In war, this feeling of slight Â�differentiation was suspended: I felt one with, and just like, everyone else.47

This quotation ends with the physical being read, or at least angled, towards a collective mental truth: a new form of knowledge emerging from the physical particularity of, implicitly, the bombsites. But how, in the stories, does the ‘abnormal’ relate to the physicalÂ€– why might bombsites produce a definite, or unique, kind of haunting, one different to those forms previously encountered in BritainÂ€– or in Ireland? And why do Bowen’s versions of wartime haunting in London depend on a physical space, especially a physical terrain of bomb damage? Part of the answer comes in how the uncanny presences in the wartime workÂ€– that is, the short stories and The Heat of DayÂ€– allow a questioning of selfhood, of the problematic protagÂ� onist. Corcoran lists the different kinds of Bowen wartime story, and he convincingly groups them into sets, seeing different aspects of the ghostly in each.48 But, as Bowen herself wrote in the above preface: It is the ‘I’ that is soughtÂ€– and retrieved at the cost of no little pain. And, the ghostsÂ€– definite in ‘Green Holly’, questionable (for are they subjective purely?) in ‘Pink May’, ‘The Cheery Soul’ and ‘The Demon Lover’: what part do they play? They are the certainties. The bodiless foolish wanton, the puritan other presence, the tipsy cook with her religion of English fare, the ruthless young soldier lover unheard of since 1916: hostile or not, they rally, they fill the vacuum for the uncertain ‘I’.49

The vacuum is indeed filledÂ€ – but these ghosts need a habitat, and a rationale from the violence that has allowed them to emerge. In one of her earlier novels Bowen appears to predicate loss on materiality: ‘these things are what we mean when we speak about civilisation … In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life’.50 ‘O Madam’, written in the lull of late 1941, was one of her first attempts at finding a language that can transform totalising metropolitan destruction into a revelatory arena, and account for the sensations of material loss. Partly this comes

The haunted city

161

through formal trickery. The story is a continuous monologue from a servant, speaking, hesitantly, to her titular employer. As she itemises what has been lost the physical cracks and gaps of the house start to be performed in the lacunae of the story, the perpetual refrain ‘O Madam …’ dropping off as another part of the formally pristine property is engulfed by the uncontrollable force and the expendability of the servant in this new world is made plain and brutal. The story can only conjure up stability through apparitions; the ghosts of the past are strangely desired here. ‘In the Square’, the first of the stories collected in The Demon Lover and other Stories, opens with an over-obvious hauntingÂ€– ‘a whitish reflection, ghost of the glare at midday’.51 But this is then developed through a causal chain of unsettling links, each character ill at ease, until the obviousness of the first image becomes the supposed explanation (DL 7). Whereas in ‘In Pink May’ the apparition that is intent on spoiling the protagonist’s illicit nights out makes herselfÂ€– and it is definitely a sheÂ€– plain and clear in material terms: she jangles and upsets dressing tables and sends gusts of wind. But she also alters a way of seeingÂ€– bringing a nervy tiredness to bear and making the act of perception into one more akin to transformÂ� ation: the cuckolded husband now ‘lay there like the dead. He was abnormally done in, I suppose’ (DL 156). Beyond the signs of near death the shapes history has made through violence leave their imprints on Bowen’s characters; and such imprints allow the ingress of spirits. In ‘The Demon Lover’ Mrs Drover’s return to her house, one shut up for the duration, is a vertiginous fall into debateable realms. First comes the dust, not suspended in the air but present as index to destruction elsewhere. In the street itself ‘an unfamiliar queerness has silted up’ (DL 80), and, when inside, the metaphor finds actuality: for while the marks suggestive of suppressed violence are thereÂ€– the traces from ‘her former habit of life’ in the form of the ‘bruise’ of a handle, and the ‘claw-marks’ of removed furnitureÂ€– they are all coated not just with the dust but also with ‘a film of another kind’, one that disguises the menace. The eventual denouement of the story, as the ghost of a pastÂ€– demonicÂ€– lover emerges to take his promised bride, is the phantasmagoric taxi ride, and thus Mrs Drover becomes the driven. Silently screaming, she is pressed against the partition glassÂ€– a surface without all the textures of warning that she chose to ignore – as ‘the taxi, without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets’ (DL 87). As Bowen then writes, ‘Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and everyone else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and

162

Reading the Ruins

weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other.’52 Questions concerning the porous boundary between the living and the dead, and how it can thus be represented, animate other, very different, writers too. Anna Kavan, a rather more neglected short story writer, is a useful point of comparison here; as her wartime worksÂ€– published as I am Lazarus (1943) and Asylum Piece (1945)Â€– also depend on a reading of the uncanny through symbols that disclose both the objects of the past and horrific fear.53 In ‘Glorious Boys’ a couple from Australia, Kavan’s own home, meet again in wartime London, but the reunion they have is marked with dread.54 The story turns in again and again on itself, analysing every gesture. For Mia, the over-pensive protagonist, the body in wartime seems to be conditioned by its potential for violent disillusion, and potential for fragmentation, even to its inhabitant: The terrifying independence of the body. Its endless opposition. The appalling underground movement of the nerves, muscles, viscera, upon which, like a hated and sadistic gauleiter, one unremittingly imposed an implacable repressive regime, threatened eternally by the equally implacable threat of insubordination.55

But while London is ‘no different from the other cities unlighted and waiting amongst their ruins under the moon’ these particular ruins let forth a noise, the cry of a doom-predicting birdÂ€– with a name suggesting eerie and yet domestic menaceÂ€– the morepork. The couple had last heard this bird together in Australia, just before he left for Britain on his troopship. Now the cry is heard again. The haunted nature of wartime London is such that it can draw in symbols of doom from across the world, mix them together with the individual consciousnesses of disparate characters, and send them back out again. So Mia senses this apparitional warning or messenger: ‘[h]er eyes refusing the lighted sky she was not sure what part of life she was in; then she was back from wherever it was to the war and the warlocked town’.56 Despite the grand scale of devastation, ‘the double stream of destruction, feeling the composite entity of the bomber streams, gigantic cruising serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world’, this particular sign is meant for herÂ€– and thus Ken, if he ever actually exists, vanishes in the air raid. The menace of the metropolis, and its repleteness with signs that emerge from the rooms to point deathwards, also shapes the story of discovery ‘Our City’. Here London is considered a trap, full of the luring ghosts, and is ultimately a ghost itself: ‘Our City itself is ravening at the night’. Then an overviewÂ€– literal as well as symbolicÂ€– Â� becomes possible: We all of us know from films or pictures or the posters of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, those hideous toothed traps, sadistic jaws … There

The haunted city

163

is even a sort of resemblance between the serrated blade as it must appear shearing down on its prey and the ferocious skyline of the city partially laid waste.57

The eventual mental state of the protagonist, by the end of the tenth section of the story, is to accept that London will both haunt her and hunt her; and all that will be disclosed of this process will be the ghostlike apparition, one ‘with mechanical speech’, that she will become.58 Yet for some wartime writers beneath all the layers of the physical city there lay some animate spiritual residue, some supernatural fluorescence of past lives that could be put to a theological order and sense. The two protagonists lost in the wrecked city at the start of Charles Williams’ All Hallows’ Eve (1945) know only that ‘something’ is wrong; ‘something’ has been irreparably altered in the crash of a fallen plane.59 They are right in these strangely indeterminate sensationsÂ€– because they are now ghosts. There is a haunting strangeness to this novel, with its staccato style eliding the fusion that brings a very Oxford High Church Christianity (in a line of descent from Laudianism) up against a fascination for the milieu of spirit mediums and Faustian insights. Key to their near somnambulist progressÂ€– for that is what the motion of Evelyn and Lester, the two young women who act as guides, resemblesÂ€ – is the stark fact of being trapped, locked or drawn to a definable space, that of the city. But it is a city remade through high explosives into an arena, a space for the confrontation with evil, that provides the novel’s theological mainspring. This focus on the city as knowable stage for investigation and conflict can be glimpsed in Williams’ wartime essay ‘The Image of the City in English Verse’.60 Here he elucidates a partial canon of Christian thought layered across Shakespeare, Milton and others, pivoting around his dichotomy of city against nationÂ€ – and emphasising the city as a space knowable through physicality, and especially through physical movement. But Williams has tracked a model of constructing meaning, faithÂ€– or something darkerÂ€– through ambulatory patterns in a city rich with signifiers such as churches. Therefore in his own novel this knowledge makes the necropolis which Evelyn and Lester attempt to decipher doubly hostile: for as they enact a parody of faithful trek from station to station of the cross (or of, perhaps now, Kings Cross to Charing Cross), they are confronted with smashed buildings and rubble-strewn streets. S h a l l ow, c r at e r e d, e x t i nc t The problem of how a phantom might comprehend a bomb-damaged city provides the rationale for a postwar novel concerned with the mundanity, largely, of being dead: G. W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947). Here

164

Reading the Ruins

the protagonist, after being killed by a falling bomb, haunts the spaces left to him, quite literally, by the book: ‘A favourite book of mine, at one period, must have been Baedeker’s London. I had obtained off a barrow a copy for a few pence, an old edition, I fancy, which didn’t account for recent changes.’61 Yet it is Bowen’s short story ‘Mysterious Kôr’ (1944) that represents the apotheosis of the tendencies in all these writers to understand the bombed city as intrinsically apparitional; and yet in doing so it adds addÂ� itional layers of spatial and textual complication. The story opens with an estrangingly aerial view, one reminiscent of that of a bomber pilot: Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capitalÂ€– shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in the windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs, every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead. (DL 173)

Yet it is a text that allows the buildings in ruins to be read, and the whole experience to be understood, through parallels and links to a past, and one shaped through a literary text. The central couple, Pepita and her soldier boyfriend Arthur, are roaming the illuminated city at night, but on the edge of a street she starts to quote an Arthur Lang sonnet, the poem that gave Rider Haggard the images for his novel She: ‘Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moonÂ€–’ â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•›â•›â•›– ‘This is Kôr.’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s years since I’ve thought of that.’ She said: ‘I think of it all the timeÂ€– “Not in the wastes beyond the swamps and sand, The fever haunted forest and lagoon, Mysterious Kôr thy wallsÂ€–” – a completely forsaken city, as high as cliffs and as white as bones, with no historyÂ€–’ (DL 174–5)

Yet the city summoned up through her incantational quotation, a ghostly counterpart or echo of London, is solid and firm: it is haunted as it gives a space or arena for the Recurrence of fear. That is why it is Â�infectious,

The haunted city

165

trapping first Arthur and then the flatmate Callie. As Arthur says, believing in the compelling enchantment of this ghost city: ‘So we began to playÂ€– we were off in Kôr.’ ‘Core of what?’ ‘Mysterious KôrÂ€– ghost city.’ ‘Where?’ ‘You may ask. But I could have sworn she saw it, and from the way she saw it I saw it too. A game’s a game, but what’s a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets into you and you can’t laugh it off.’ (DL 187–8)

What cannot be laughed off, or satisfactorily answered in the text, is this ultimate ghost, the obverse of a whole city, and its lasting enticements through both sleep and waking hours. The insight of ArthurÂ€ – ‘to be human is a dead loss’Â€– seems to give an implicit teleology of beckoning ghosthood for him too, as well as for Pepita, as ‘it was to Kôr’s finality that she turned’ (DL 189). Bu r i e d m e mor i e s The Heat of the Day both uses these short stories, and their particular Â�temporal and spatial intensities, and disowns them. It covers the expanse of war, with the normality of bombing becoming prosaicÂ€– ‘[t]he detonÂ� ation dulled off’ (HD 96). Written throughout the war and after, its tightly delineated form and content depend neither upon a poised encounter nor an individual and insightful moment of haunting. Rather within it there is a sensibility of the layered tracery; the layering down of multiple levels of haunting and unease that willÂ€– or mightÂ€– emerge again. As a character realises, ‘that psychic London was to be gone for ever; more bombs would fall but not on the same city’ (HD 92). Like the actual burial of the ruins of London’s bombsites out in the Hackney marshes, a process which was covered in detail by newspapers, typified through articles such as ‘No mourning by request’ with its images entitled ‘London buries her past’,62 the layers of Bowen’s apparitional objects and their resonances are laid down in amnesia-inducing hidden strata. This continuous remaking, the watchful sensing of the apparitions, shows how the fear of ‘Mysterious Kôr’– that ‘if you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it’ (DL 176)Â€– comes true, and it does so for London.

Ch apter 5

The new London jungle

The number of these flowering plants and ferns on ruined sites rose after a few seasons to 126: among them, pleasant to name if hard to distinguishÂ€ – Bulbous Buttercup, Codlins-and-Cream, Musk Mimulus, Swine’s Cress, Gallant Soldiers, White Goosefoot or Fat Hen, Yorkshire Fog, Fool’s Parsley, Evening Primrose.

G. W. Stonier, ‘The Flowering Wen’ (1951)1

The creation of implausibly lush zones in the midst of London was one of the most unexpected transformations that resulted from incendiary and high-explosive bomb attacks. Acts of personal endurance and survival during the Blitz itself, framed by rhetoric and stoicism, did not offer any teleology for London’s inhabitants to expect this subsequent floral revival. The blackened timbers, fallen masonry and exposed brickwork of the bombsites, markers of how the war had arrived in the city, were also habitats that the metropolis had not previously possessed. Swift colonisation of such debris by plants, through seeds carried on the wind or by birds, was remarked upon by naturalists as early as 1941.2 In the years that followed many bombsites became luxuriant spaces where ruins and ashes were shaded by the energetic growth of leaves and flowers. Not all inhabitants were surprisedÂ€– or should have been surprised. For analogous to the pre-war concept, as imagined by modernism, of the city as a zone of fragmented destruction, literary and visual culture had proleptically envisaged the return of the wild to the metropolis. Detailed fictional templates of how the city would revert to nature had been created from the time of the Victorians onwards; however, the effect of actually seeing the city’s ruins ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by vegetationÂ€– loaded words in the wartime and postwar yearsÂ€– troubled and intrigued both writers and artists. The recuperative metaphorical potential in Â�flowers springing from rubble or birds singing over blackened buildings was obvious, and it was utilised officially in posters and broadcastsÂ€– but also in more complex and ambivelent ways as inspiration for various 166


167

artistic works. The complications unleashed when now deserted parts of a city reverted to a greenly fruitful state also brought complex responses, ranging through elation, menace, neurosis and dread. For while this new jungle became a haven for flora and fauna, a space for children’s games and Gothic imaginations, it was also a lawless and liminal zone. In this chapter I want to question why the bombsites were portrayed as both oasis and jungle, and then to theorise and track how the flora that thrived there made its way into culture and literature. Central to my analysis will be the wartime and postwar work of Rose Macaulay (1881–1958), especially her complicated and multi-faceted novel The World my Wilderness (1950). Many British texts of the Second World War and after use the soothing greening of the ruins, manipulating them as either evocative backgrounds or thematic resources. Yet no other work centres on them with the mesmeric and compulsive certainty of Macaulay, a certainty deriving from her own brutal personal experiences; she worked as an ambulance driver rescuing civilians in the midst of the Blitz, and her own flat was bombed and destroyed. Converging with her immediate experience was her particular aesthetic disposition, notably a long-standing interest in ruins throughout history, coupled with a desire to derive meaning from them. Thus in The World my Wilderness she does not just draw upon these sites as resonant locales for personal drama, though they are indeed spaces for tracking guilt and forgiveness in a stage set with lyrical and melancholic properties. Her novel also uses them to begin thinking about literary form. Concepts of ruins cloaked in vegetation become analogous to the fragments of other texts embedded in her work. The Waste Land takes on a talismanic significance; characters within the novel cite it freely, and the novelist herself employs it to shape the text, showing only the beginning of her particular reimagining of literary modernism as actuality in the city. The poem’s cultural pessimism and fragmentation give a template to the narrative, but against this, in Macaulay’s vision, the wilderness that takes over the bombsites conceals pain and offers organicist vitality. The novel, in its movement from a pollen-intoxicated listing of the species of plants on the bombsites to a meditation on questions of guilt and morality, knows far more than this; it offers the possibility of constructing a textÂ€– as well as livesÂ€– from fragments. Pr e c u r s or s a n d p or t e n t s Gustave Doré’s engraving ‘The New Zealander’ (1873) is perhaps the most famous depiction of ruins. In this picture an artist, apparently recently

168

Reading the Ruins

arrived back in England from the new colony, looks at the ruined capital that his ancestors have left. He is depicted as not only gazing at the prospect of the River ThamesÂ€– but also as drawing the broken and shattered buildings of the capital arrayed in tiers stretching back towards the cracked dome of St Paul’s. In sketching these ruins he is bringing home to London the tropes of the grand tour and of nascent archaeology: the recording of past civilisations. But there is more than this; for when the etching is inspected more closely, behind the fading sign for ‘Commercial Wharf’ and the overneat receding horizon, come the plants. The city has fallen, and it is now being engulfed by vegetation. Trees push up along the banks of the river and ivy drapes itself in great swags from dead-eyed windows. Doré’s etching frames itself as an artefact through the insertion of a character who is mediating this overgrown world of the future to the viewer. The figure of the New Zealander as an archetypal visitor from the future, as Christopher Woodward has convincingly shown, haunted many of the late Victorian pessimistic-futuristic ideas of Britain becoming a depopulated and unkempt pile of ruins.3 However there is a long lineage of writers captivated by the vicarious pleasure of imagining London easily lost to a resurgent nature,4 whether natural catastrophe, human-inflicted disaster, or simple desertion. Visions of a metropolis collapsing into a silent but bucolic jungle ran through the high Victorian literature and into the twentieth century as a pleasureÂ€– and a genre. The cultural corollary for such visions of loss and abandonment were, paradoxically, stories of discoveries: actual narratives of newly revealed ruined cities, whether of the Aztecs in Mexico or in deepest Africa.5 To these must be added fictional tales of exploration and vanished realms, such as the island plateau of dinosaurs in Arthur Conan-Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). Together these sources succeeded in giving a template for imagining London beneath a jungle. It was a mode that combined the frisson of helpless recognition, as the banally familiar cityscape now vanished, estranged under vines or mud, with the fertile descriptions, imagery and plausible details of natural history. Moreover, in offering a riposte to progressive futurism, it filled tropes of the pastoral with menace; and implicitly converted newly popularised Darwinian concepts of evolution into an assessment that the actual solidity of the human-dominated world was merely a passing epoch. Notable for using a native British character in excursions into a protofuture of pleasure and menace is Richard Jefferies’ After London; or, Wild England (1885). The title itself offers both a teleology of the passing of a city and a preferred state; a reversion to a ‘wild’ countryside undominated


169

by the great wen of the city. Jefferies’ writings from the 1870s onwards are dense with visions of London’s post-catastrophe erasure, notably brought about by an icy über-winter in his unpublished fragment ‘The Great Snow’: On the 29th the gale moderated but meantime snow had fallen unceasingly, and it had now reached a depth of ten feet. With slight variation it continued at this depth but the drifts of course were of an enormous height. The National Gallery was wholly hidden under a mound of snow. The dome of St Paul’s was alone visible, rising up like the roof of a huge Esquimoux [sic] hut. The great gilt cross on the top had been torn off by the violence of the wind. An intense frost set in, but the sky remained covered with a leaden pall of cloud, and the sun was invisible.6

By the end of the fragment London is an iceberg-hemmed zone of mobs, debris and fanaticsÂ€ – who ‘often cast themselves into the flames of the burning houses, and their roasted bodies were eaten by the miserable creatures around’.7 Yet After London differs qualitatively from this precursor text, and not only because it is verdancy rather than ice that brings civilÂ� isation crashing down. For in his novel Jefferies moved towards a sustained meditation upon lossÂ€– and yet its tone of mourning a lost world is held in check by the glee with which the destruction of the city is described. The narrative as a whole splits into two sections, with the first as a framing device, explaining the disaster that had overcome Britain. Here the drowning of the lowlands of the Thames valley is envisaged through a prism of the arts and crafts movement; the new sea that covers London leads to a reversion of the people to a life of demi-chivalric honour, peasantry and subsistence farmingÂ€– indeed William Morris’ utopian fantasy of smug primitivism in News from Nowhere (1890) was directly inspired by Jefferies.8 Moreover, Jefferies is especially interesting as he establishes some of the key tropes and movements that later writers would use in attempting to portray the cityÂ€– when it became covered with real trees and grasses. What happens to this fictive London through the steadily incremental forces of nature is retold with pleasure by the narrator: For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown. At this day all those parts, which were built upon low ground, are marshes and swamps. Those houses that were upon high ground were, of course, like the other towns, ransacked of all they contained by the remnant that was left; the iron, too, was extracted. Trees growing up by them in time cracked the walls, and they fell in. Trees and bushes covered them; ivy and nettles concealed the crumbling masses of brick.9

170

Reading the Ruins

The prose attempts to hold the formal conceit that it is part of an oral tradition; the near personification of London’s fate as it is ‘overthrown’ is placed alongside the generalised descriptions. Here doom has reached the urban mass not in the form of nameable species but rather due to generic trees, shrubs and bushes. The second section of the novel, a quest narrative, takes the hero Felix Aquila around the lake that now covers most of London and, eventually, to a demonic island that is all that remains of the centre. But while this place is rich in abandoned (and now worthless) coins, it is deadly. It is an island stilled, poisoned and shrouded with miasma. When Felix lands, the physicalisation of the collective past is figured in the tunnelled and hollowed space beneath his tentative feet: The ground looked, indeed, as if it had been burnt, but there were no charred stumps of timber such as he had seen on the sites of forest fires. The extreme dreariness seemed to oppress his spirits, and he went on and on in a heavy waking dream. Descending into a plain, he lost sight of the flaming sunset and the black waters. In the level plain the desolation was yet more marked; there was not a grass-blade or plant; the surface was hard, black, and burned, resembling iron, and indeed in places it resounded to his feet, though he supposed that was the echo from hollow passages beneath.10

Despite nearly dying, Felix evades the legacy of metropolitan toxicity that appears as the physical and mental fug. He escapes to end up as a demiking, ruling gypsies at a safe distance from the remains of London. Another text where there is something deadly still lurking in a deserted capital is H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898). For here, as well as contending with the MartiansÂ€– whose abject mix of slime and intelligence puts them in a liminal category of alien/plant/creatureÂ€– the remaining humans in London see their city overgrown in a matter of days with monstrous plants: ‘a bubbly mass of red weed’ that swarmed up the trees about the old Â�palace.11 The timescale of alteration is wildly differentÂ€– days instead of yearsÂ€– but the shock of the encounter is comparable. M u n da n i t y a n d w i l l ow h e r b Against such vista-shaking horrors the small-scale observational mundanity of Edward Thomas’ travels, as he criss-crossed England, should come as a respite or relief to a reader. Thomas was an enthusiastic supporter and biographer of Jefferies, and his reaction to After London was one of rapt enjoyment. They were, however, very different writers and the Downs and the Weald traversed by Thomas contain no monsters. While the life force of ‘Nature’ (again capitalised throughout) is strong in Thomas’ work,


171

it can be mediated and enjoyed by the traveller. Throughout the 1890s Thomas’ tramping through the south-east of England led to his granting it an appellation, seeing as it had no regional designation comparable to Wessex or the Borders, as the ‘South Country’Â€– taking as a model the poem by Hilaire Belloc. This then provided him with his own book’s title. Yet despite roaming the lanes, and gaining a sense of oneness with the earth, ‘unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy out of doors’,12 he had a problem. For to sell his articles Thomas had to travel into and through London. This pain was remedied in his texts through focusing on transience, and finding the hopeful signs ofÂ€– naturalÂ€– decay even in the city streets that become a revenge fantasy for his beloved ‘Nature’: I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowersÂ€ – as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero. I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals, sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls.13

This passage of pleasurably contemplating the end of a city, whose direct precursor and point of comparison is a Roman tyrant, moves from generalities to the specifics of process and incremental change. Nature’s ‘toil’ is portrayed, and given moral approval, through verbs that are generative, as he shows the loss or eclipse of man-made structures through ‘mossing … rusting … sowing’. The comforting power of ‘Nature’ to work without any human intervention can be seen again in Thomas’ poetry. For while the only specifically named, and thus memorable, plant that ends up being sown here is rosebay willowherb, it is one of many that also featured in his poem ‘Adlestrop’. There the platform’s utter silence and lack of human action is surrounded and surmounted by: ‘willows, willow-herb and grass / And meadowsweet and haycocks dry’.14 Thomas, killed in the First World War, was not to know how rosebay willowherb, already common in his time beside railway tracks and on deserted building sites, would go on to become the archetypal plant of the recuperative greening bombsites; especially those that are the settings and moral centre of Rose Macaulay’s The World my Wilderness. Ro s e M ac au l a y ’s h i s t or y of f e a r s A pagan sense of nature, with curative vegetation hiding the ruins of civilisation or waiting to re-engulf it, was a persistent theme for Macaulay

172

Reading the Ruins

from her earliest juvenilia and poetry onwards. For a girl of her generÂ� ation and class, the extent to which her childhood was spent outdoors and unsupervised (in Wales, Cornwall and Italy) was unusual. Her earliest writing reflected this, shaped through various Georgian and Edwardian conventions of deification and communion with the ‘natural’. But by 1913 her poetic vision had Cambridge collapsing back into primordial marsh and ooze, with the recuperative power of nature set against the fear of what would happen if ‘wild things from without peered through’ and civilisation was revealed as just a veneer: Wild wet things that swam in King’s Parade The days it was a marshy fen, Through the rent veil they did sprawl and wade Blind bog-beasts and Ugrian men. And the city was not.15

Later in life, in her book of essays, Catchwords and Claptrap (1926), she identified and criticised the obsessive ‘verbal haloes’ that a certain language and phrasing created in her own poetry and that of others in the period, indicting, among others, the following words: ‘purple, pale, strangeÂ�coloured, shadowy, grey, blind, swooping, glimmering, shimmering, honeycoloured’.16 Part of this critique is of her own writing and the debt it owed to Walter de la Mare and other Georgians. But part is also a move to limit appraisal to the linguistic texture of her work: the subject matter, it is implicitly suggested, shouldÂ€– and wouldÂ€– stay unaltered. Indeed, while her style changed markedly throughout her oeuvre there remained the continual presence of the untameable natural world, lying at the margins of complex and brittle lives, available as a metaphor or plot device. Macaulay was, and still is, an enigmatic figure. She was one of the first British twentieth-century women to earn her income through writing, a fact Virginia Woolf alluded to when sniffily describing her as ‘too much of a professional’.17 Macaulay wrote over twenty novels from 1906 until just before her death, as well as essays, broadcasts, anthologies and travelogues. But her position in the London literary scene, and then in literary history, was one of an author moving through and between groupings, whether aesthetic or political, as her latest biographer sums up well: ‘Wherever you turn, in any decade in the first half of the twentieth century, there is Rose Macaulay. But she is in no place centrally, not for long. “Forever in transit”, Rosamond Lehmann said of her, “physically, intellectually, spiritually”.’18 She was a product of an intellectual dynasty, reaching back to the historian Lord Thomas Macaulay, and her upbringing


173

near CambridgeÂ€– beyond the months where she was left to roam woods and coastsÂ€– included swims with Rupert Brooke in the River Cam and an exposure to an assured literary culture. Her time at Somerville College, Oxford, was marked by social reticence, but also by the value she placed on her writing as both private and public; publishable and apparently easily accessible, but encoded with autobiographical details. Again this bifurÂ�Â� cating tendency would last the rest of her life. Her novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916) was a prolonged meditation on suffering, as the artist protagonist flees through London, terrified of the Zeppelin attacks and destruction that will come from above.19 Unrelieved by hope or by patriotic gloss, it can be plausibly understood as an anti-war work, as well as a study in fear comparable to a similar record of artistic responses to vulnerability, such as Iris Tree’s poem ‘Zeppelins’.20 But while in Non-Combatants the narrative themes of fear from the air and traumatised aftermath foreshadow The World my Wilderness, Macaulay’s successes in interwar London were those of a light novelist. She also wrote various comedies of manners with darker notes, interspersed with experiments in history, the historical novel and studies of cultural and social changes, for example in her collected essays, Personal Pleasures (1935). Her milieu was not that of Bloomsbury but moved beyond and through it with novels that satirised social mores of London or working life for newly emancipated women. Her friends included Vera Britten and Elizabeth Bowen; but many noted Macaulay’s desire to compartmentalise her life and to keep secrecy at the centre of her mode of engagement, whether thematically in her novels or as a guiding principle in social interactions. Throughout her interwar works Macaulay specialised in the female innocent lost, employing heroines such as Denham of Crewe Train (1926) or Daisy of Keeping up Appearances (1928) with their (albeit coruscating) wittiÂ�cisms on London literary life. But they give the reader no preparation for Barbary, the protagonist of The World my Wilderness; and they also give no hint to Macaulay’s engagement with modernism’s love of the fragment and the moral complexitiesÂ€– actual and textualÂ€– in a post-Second World War world. L on d on a s a g r e e n wor l d Written in 1948–9, The World my Wilderness is an exuberantly strange yet moral tale. Promoted as ‘a good read for all brows’ on the first edition’s dust jacket, its initial popularity may well have obscured its complexity, and, apart from some honourable exceptions, it has not received

174

Reading the Ruins

sustained or insightful critical attention.21 Set in postwar London, amid the actual, social and familial ruins, its heroine is Barbary, a 17-year-old girl to whose overdetermined name I will return. Covering a few months of 1945–6, the novel follows her and her half-brother Raoul. Having ‘run wild’ with the Maquis while living in southern France, the pair are utterly unsuited for the conventional city to which they are sent. Both are supposed to become socialised in preparation for their future lives and roles; Barbary studies art at the Slade while staying with her father, Sir Gulliver, who has now remarried; while Raoul learns how to be a young merchant with his petty bourgeois relatives. But both are drawn to the bombsites that occupy swathes of the city. There they encounter a different London, populated by criminals, deserters and runawaysÂ€– and shaped by codes of resistance to authority familiar to them from France. The main locales of the novelÂ€– the bombsites around St Paul’sÂ€– are precisely and accurately described, with Macaulay’s apparently artful lyricism correlating exactly to the names of real streets and actual damage, culminating in the inclusion of specific and named churches, buildings and streets, with minute details such as stonework, missing windows and period particulars all present.22 The expanse of this setting can only be grasped if, rather than correlating the sites to postwar building on the ground, a reader consults bomb-damage maps of the period (see Fig. 8). These portray specifically and unambiguously the tract of totally deserted land that reached around the cathedral, up from the river to beyond Smithfield.23 Despite chapters that focus on her mother, the sybatric HelenÂ€ – and her brother, the war-weary RitchieÂ€– the novel closely pursues Barbary, and her experiences, throughout. Her thoughts interpolate the action, charting her reactions that come in direct response to her exposure to the bombsites. Her androgynous status, and desire to form a life for herself as an ‘artist’, make her a liminal character in her society and yet one in Macaulay’s tradition of tomboyish heroines.24 Yet she is damaged and multiply traumatised: by her family, by her complicity with the murder of a collaborator in France (her mother’s husband), and by her inability to adjust to the demands of class, money or propriety in London. Most critÂ� ical work on Macaulay has tracked the position of Barbary as a damaged but resilient flâneuse, or it has concentrated upon her as a half-knowing, half-self-eliding avatar of trauma.25 The World my Wilderness succeeds, for it does not offer images of the bombsites as primordial tracts beyond description. Instead, these are zones of possibility for Barbary, with their status as ruins newly revealing palimpsestic layers: of past lives, hidden meanings and references to literary works.


Figure 8â•‡ Destroyed and damaged buildings around St Paul’s, 1945, from The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps

175

176

Reading the Ruins Gr eenery

At first, to both Barbary and Raoul, the fact that London is filled with ‘ruins and thicker jungles of greenery’ is unremarkable. The normality of destruction is met with a shrug: ‘“You see,” said Barbary nonchalantly, “there are lots of empty houses and flats.” Raoul saw that this was so. Neither he nor Barbary was surprised, or even greatly interested; these broken habitations, this stony rubbish, seemed natural to them.’26 From disinterest, however, the novel moves to a position where the action and character developmentÂ€– both moral and physicalÂ€– becomes possible only on these sites. The striking feature of this central terrain, and the space given over to its description, is the enfolding verdancy of the bombsites; for they are, in contrast with the grey austerity of London, a ‘green world’ (WW 181). Barbary, having initially established herself in broken houses near Cheapside, soon finds wilder ruins and thicker jungles of greenery in which to hide securely. The term ‘jungle’ is repeated as a way for both the characters and readers to understand these spaces, for a jungle is a collection of plants as well as a locale; and it is a natural space even if here it does cover ruins. But this jungle is composed of a very specific collection of flowers: those species adept at colonising burnt and blasted rubble. Macaulay portrays the bombsites in intensive descriptions that are multi-clausal, labyrinthine and hypo-tactical. The sentences are long; much longer than those used for the ‘meaningless grey’ London of respectability and surviving undamaged structures. In the fifth chapter the narrative tracks the vantage point gained by Barbary, through her climbing up to the top of a ruin, and subsequent descriptions follow the pattern she sets here: a mix of pseudo-aeriality, close-up listing and taxonomic precision: The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundation of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs. (WW 53)

This model is elaborated on in further descriptions: the tangled spaces of the sites are again mimetically reproduced by a sinuous and articulated prose that withholds final meaning until the close of the sentence, while placing the weight of argument on sensations (smells, sounds, sights) rather than abstracted knowledge. Time is measured organically here: Summer slipped on; a few blazing days when London and its deserts burned beneath a golden sun, and the flowering weeds and green bracken hummed with


177

insects, and the deep underground cells were cool like churches, and the long grass wilted, drooped and turned to hay; then a number of cool wet days, when the wilderness was sodden and wet and smelt of decay, and the paths ran like streams, and the ravines were deep in dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes. (WW 79)

Pr i e s t s i n t h e f ol i ag e It is not only through lists and litanies that the complications of nature as both a form of recuperative regeneration and as a cloaking of the ruins can be understood. Chapter 23 of the novel opens with a scene well described by Stonebridge as ‘a wonderful piece of early beatnik camp’.27 The characters are at home in the shell of St Giles’ church, with a radio playing jazz, a black kitten held up as a putative sacrifice and Barbary’s completed fresco of ‘The Last Judgement’ on the wall with ‘the wicked damned taking off for a leap into the flames’. Into this scene ‘the clergyman looked through the West window, parting the branches that screened it’ (WW 166). He thus momentarily resembles a Green Man of fertility rites, another wraithlike figure much used in neo-romantic art and forming the cover for Sculpture in England (1953). As well as the Â�clergyman thus being linked to a pagan tradition, he is also a messenger from the dead. Gathering the bombsite maquisards together he too preaches of hell, building to a terrible climax: ‘“Trapped, trapped, trapped there is no hope … for this is hell, hell, hell”’ (WW 167). When a younger clergyman comes to collect him, and explains how Father Roger was pinned under a beam in his burning church after an air raid, he also tries to reassure the cowering congregation. ‘“I’m afraid he frightened you.” “No,” said Barbary. “Not more than I was already”’ (WWÂ€167). Images of hell preoccupy her feverish dreams after the climax of the novel where she falls into one of the pits or voids left amid the bombsites, breaking her bones, and thus being temporarily rescued and then confined back to ‘civilisation’. This drama precipitates her mother’s return to Britain and the melodrama of her parents’ final row: concluding with the droppingÂ€– by her motherÂ€– of the ‘bomb or bombshell’ (WW 249) news of Barbary’s actual rather than assumed paternity. In France too, where Barbary spends the war, the forest and plants barely conceal ruins. This is pointed out by Ritchie, Barbary’s AngloCatholic brother, who after years of conflict longs for civilised life as he walks in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Under the ‘cork-oak woods in the deepening twilight’ come the ghosts of

178

Reading the Ruins

Roussillon, ancient home of wild Visgoths fleeing over the mountains from Saracens, ancient fief of Barcelona counts, later a province of the Kings of Aragon, a prey to Spanish armies, the French invaders, to the trampling of the nations … the peace that shrouded land and sea was a mask, lying thinly over terror, over hate, over cruel deeds done. (WW 148–9)

Back in London the bombsites are revisited and coloured through further description. Macaulay creates her jungle through incremental listings that take an inventory of flora and push it to another plane, but it is rather a chant than a list, with the apposite placing of names giving a rolling, heady, or even stupefying rhythm: ‘bracken and bramble, golden ragwort and coltsfoot, fennel and foxglove and vetch’ (WW 128). Later the alliteration pairs plants together: ‘the red campion, the yellow charlock, the bramble, the bindweed, the thorn-apple, the thistle and the vetch’ (WW 253). Where do these species come fromÂ€– and how did the author know them? Macaulay knew her plants, and their provenances, in great detail. Throughout the war she had explored the bombsites with an eye to botanical discovery, partly in the company of Penelope Fitzgerald, who had ‘alarming experiences of scrambling after her … and keeping her spare form just in view as she shinned down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window’.28 These expeditions, and the physical act of collecting, were followed by the minutiae of pressing, preserving and botanical labelling. Throughout the summer of 1948 Macaulay had also sent cuttings of plants and trees to her friend Frank Swinterton for precise identification.29 Such biographical details summon images of high Victorian endeavour and innocence; the Lady Botanist amid the ruins. These images would have a lot to recommend them as a way, perhaps even a defensive or healing strategy, of turning a mass or mess of debris into a continuation of the English pastoral tradition; yet Macaulay’s continual recourse to naming plant species could not trammel vegetation into productive meadows or the much lauded dig-for-victory allotments. Rather, their continual citation was an act of mesmerised recognition; a form of acquiescence in the savage and strange transformative power of nature, more wildwood than haywain. The problems inherent in attempts to describe or enclose meaning in these bombsite spaces show through in the structure and texture of R. S. R. Fitter’s works on London’s wildlife. Fitter was the foremost naturalist of postwar Britain, a broadcaster and author of over thirty books. His first complete work beyond his scientific papers was the first volume of the New Naturalist series, published by William Collins, and he concluded his survey with a chapter on the inescapable ‘Influence of the


179

War’.30 He charted the varieties of plants and animals unexpectedly found in the cityÂ€– but he also acknowledged the trouble of suddenly encountering wild nature within an urban context, and of accounting for natural energy that was contained under the sites of destruction: ‘it is sometimes forgotten that much of Greater London stands on the most fertile soil of the British Isles’.31 Fitter was also fond of bombsite inventories of flowers. Appendix F of The Natural History of London (1945) was a ‘list of flowering plants and ferns recorded from bombed sites within London’, which ran to four pages and 126 species, testifying to the range of opportunistic species that managed to gain rootholds in the rubble. The compiler of the list was the director of Kew Gardens, E. J. Salisbury FRS, and Salisbury had himself also delivered a lecture on the subject of bombsite flowers a few days prior to VE Day. The Times, remarkably, covered the lecture as one of its lead news stories, in language that sounded more lyrical than journalistic: ‘Wildflowers had spread over the bombsites: rosebay willowherb, coltsfoot, groundsel, Oxford ragwort, Canadian fleabane and thornapple, Thanet cress’.32 The means by which these plants had reached London were themselves signs of war: tomatoes had come from abandoned sandwiches left by rescue men; other seeds through a horse’s nosebag; Canadian fleabane was however introduced to Europe ‘in the stuffing of a parrot sent to Germany’. Fitter’s own anecdotes are held in more serious tones, and they fall back again on empirical and verifiable data. The occasional flash of delight at the sheer implausibility of black redstartsÂ€– a bird of mountain screeÂ€– nesting in a broken façade is forced back into a need for ‘reliable reporters’ and the dominant passive voice. F i r e w e e d r a m pa n t One species, more than any other, recurs in the scientific and creative catalogues of bombsite plants: the pink flowers and jagged, down-coated leaves of Epilobium angustifoliumÂ€– more commonly known as rosebay willowherb.33 It had been pressed into literature before, as in Edward Thomas’ poem ‘Adlestrop’, but now it became the emblematic flower of the bombsites. Fitter offered some suggestions as to why this was so; it was good at colonisingÂ€– 80,000 seeds per plantÂ€– and it had a liking for soil that had been subjected to heat, ‘which enables it to get a firm hold before its competitors’.34 But what Fitter could not explain was the plant’s cultural potency: appearing in drawings, sketches, poems and journalism about the bombsites. Even its commonest nicknameÂ€– FireweedÂ€– is worthy of elucidation.35 On one level it is a very basic descriptive noun: this plant

180

Reading the Ruins

comes after fire and it is a weed. But it also looks like fire still burningÂ€– with drifts of flowers both translucent pink and vivid redÂ€– and therefore offers a seeming after-image of destruction in the actuality of rebirth.36 The World my Wilderness recognises such complexity in its images of willowherb, as the flower carries both a reminder of the inescapability of war and a specific violent destruction by fire of the sites, as well as being talismanic of recovery. In the novel it is present in every litany, covering the smashed windows, stones and traces of pre-war life. It supplants the treasures of a bomb-damaged Inigo Jones courtroom, as it replaces the ‘silver cup with gilt acorns dangling, the Holbein, the Van Dyck, the plaster fruit and flowers’ (WW 180) with real organic life. Furthermore, it acts to signal to the reader one of the darker and more complex strands of the book: the admission that a metropolis full of new life is also one that must recognise the unleashed and uncontrollable nature of nature in the city, with the natural as a category beyond human agency. While walking through the ruins after dark Raoul is surprised by ‘a catÂ€– or was it a wolf?Â€– [that] leaped from beneath his feet’ (WW 74); and a bestiary not only exists within the ruins (Fitter noted three new mammals and thirty-one new birds in London). It also extends to threaten the boundary sepaÂ�rating humans from animals by the continual analogies that are drawn: men ‘become’ wildcats and ‘act’ like lizards. The enviable resilience of nature, which at the beginning of the war could be co-opted as impressively impassive, would, by the time Fitter and then Macaulay wrote, look strangely sinister when compared to human vulnerability. While children died from the waves of bomb-blasts or were pierced by glass fragments, the herbarium in the Natural History Museum was blown apart, thereby allowing Mimosa seeds, brought from China in 1793, finally to germinate and grow.37 The ground around Cripplegate churchyard, covered by buildings for six centuries, again supported crops, its fertility undiminished.38 Even nature directly under attack suffered little from bombing in the long term: ‘a horse chestnut tree in Camberwell that was stripped of all its leaves in July was in full bloom again in September’.39 The bombsite in flower initially seems a benign place to Barbary, especially when set against its creation in the actual violence of preceding years. But her self-image is tightly bound up with nature and violence in ways that are contingent upon specifically French guerrilla politics. A member or at least accomplice of the MaquisÂ€– as the French resistance were termedÂ€– she retains this identity in London, referring to herself as now part of the ‘bombsite maquis’ who ‘knew their own


181

Figure 9â•‡ Specimens of rosebay willowherb in the Natural History Museum

kind’ (WWÂ€68). The designation matters as it shows both her rejection of any kind of normative peaceÂ€– but also because it encodes a political individuality derived initially from a term for vegetationÂ€ – le maquis. Shooting GermansÂ€– and running from London policemen, whom she also terms the GestapoÂ€– become justified not by the legitimacy of state structures or political programmes, but rather from dense and aromatic foliage.

182

Reading the Ruins W h at t h e pl a n t s h i de

Beyond the politics of resistance the names, and exuberant listing, of plant species in the Second World War were potent and significant. Their nicknames and epithets flaunted pastorality or foreign originsÂ€– typified by Shepherd’s Purse and Canadian FleabaneÂ€– as well as low comedy juxtaposed with military virtueÂ€– Nipplewort and Gallant Soldiers.40 The role of foliage is also ambivalent in much of the literature of the period, and indeed acutely so in Macaulay. For the very success of seeing new growth as renovating and full of promise is predicated on the fact that it covers and hides the ruins, cloaking the vivid and unambiguous signs of pain and so rendering immediate history into something more archaeological. In The World my Wilderness the ruins of London become so hidden they are ‘like Mayan cities’ and ‘hidden for the eyes’ (WW 79). Following the First World War the American poet Carl Sandburg also used this trope of anonymous greenery as recovery, to the point of giving agency to the greensward as the putative author: ‘Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, / Shovel them under and let me workÂ€ – / I am the grass; I cover all.’ What is extinguished by such growth is individual suffering, but also any point of specific memorialisation: ‘Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: / What place is this? / Where are we now?’41 The verdant palimpsest offered here, and revisited by other writers in later decades, is dense, amnesia-inducing and certainly not translucent. The ruins to be covered in London were of a different scale to a rural battlefield, even one that had endured mechanised warfare. But London had always been differentÂ€– especially from other European cities. Following the Great Fire of 1666, a talismanic event and one frequently referred to in works on the London Blitz as comparably epoch-shattering,42 London was not rebuilt on Wren’s elegant plan but rather individually and haphazardly; moreover it did not acquire, in later centuries, Haussmannesque boulevards cut through the oldest quarters. So when the Luftwaffe’s Ju 88s and He 111s unloaded their bombs in the Second World War air raids on the capital, the mix of high explosives, thermite incendiaries and landmines fell over densely packed streets which were still a mixture of warehouses, small-scale manufacturing and houses. The destruction rendered the usual forms for understanding and navigationÂ€ – maps and signsÂ€ – useless; especially because the bombsites were spaces in which a ‘natural’ ground level had now gone. The clearly stratified forms of buildings were replaced with cliffs, slopes and rubble heaps. As the fires burnt out and the buildings collapsed, with light penetrating for the first time for years,


183

the topology newly exposed was utterly transformed. The sun shone down upon a Â�terrain of waterlogged tracks, jagged follies and precarious remains, counterpointed with caves and caverns. Thus the densely claustrophobic London darkness of, for example, Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets under the Sky (1935), was now opened up to the light. Wa r g a m e s Due to dangers and lack of useful salvage, after the first few months the bombsites became spaces largely unvisited apart from by enterprising botanists. The one group who spent more time than any other amid the ruins were children. While Macaulay took great care to individuate and characterise her adolescent protagonists who inhabited the bombsites, beyond giving them a loathing of the (British) military and stealing as attributes, these places were also a space for national myth-making, mostly involving attempts to extend wartime national unity into a very different postwar world. In the film Hue and Cry (1946) a band of boys from across London descends on the ruins near the Thames for a climactic battle with a group of spivs and crooks. The aesthetic of the film was shaped by these spaces, as Stonebridge describes well: ‘Frequently shot from either aboveÂ€– Â�looking down, for example, into bomb-craters and smashed up ceilingsÂ€– or from belowÂ€– looking up through the lattice of beams and rubble to the now clear skiesÂ€– the film’s scenes of ruin and debris evoke a strong sense of vertigo.’43 In Cecil Day-Lewis’ book for children, The Otterbury Incident (1948), the action starts from the point of a mock battle and ambush, with the recapitulatory nature of the game made clear. For while the children play seriously at anti-tank ambushesÂ€– ‘one chap hidden behind a clump of willowherb’Â€ – on a bombsite, it is also a site of loss: the houses formerly standing here were previously inhabited by one of the participants in the game, his parents having been killed in the blast. Even the title of the book plays with this redoubling, for the ‘incident’ is both the events described but also the bombsite itself; the factual wartime ‘incident’ creating it being the dropping of a stray bomb on a market town.44 Barbary’s ‘play’ is also depicted as semi-military on these variegated and uncertain urban spaces. Her reading of topography on the bombsite is instructive. The guerrilla desire for camouflage and shelter becomes central: a bell becomes a hiding space from the police and broken walls give sniper lookout holes. Yet this rapid understanding of a landscape in terms of sightlines and cover had precedents; her war games in the aftermath of conflict had precursors in games that prepared directly for

184

Reading the Ruins

war. In the early summer of 1940, when a German invasion of Britain looked likely, Tom Wintringham established a street-fighting school for the Home Guard at Osterley Park. Wintringham had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and he incorporated his experiences into violently practical courses, run by refugee Spanish republican soldiers, on the bombsites of Hackney and the city of London.45 Further, he became a mainstay of agitprop journalism that flourished throughout the summer of 1940, predicated upon the ‘front’ that was apparently inevitable following the surrender of France. Wintringham wrote a series of articles in the British photo-magazine Picture Post with titles that ranged from ‘Against invasion’ to ‘How to fight a Panzer’.46 But along with advice on stopping tanks with petrol bombs and strangling German sentries (‘take him so he cannot squeak’),47 these articles contained a revolutionary lyricism. The apotheosis of this tendency came in the piece ‘Arm the citizens!’, where he inspects civilian volunteers at Osterley Park training school: And as I watched and listened I realised I was taking part in something so new and strange as to be almost revolutionaryÂ€– the growth of an ‘army of the people’ in BritainÂ€– and at the same time something that is older than Britain, almost as old as EnglandÂ€– a gathering of the ‘men of the counties able to bear arms’.48

The juxtaposition of the old and the new locates this journalism within a strain of neo-romanticism, and it bears comparison with the sequence in Powell and Pressburger’s film A Canterbury Tale (1944) where the hawk transforms into the fighter aircraftÂ€– and the pilgrims into soldiers. Wintringham’s guerrilla-centric journalistic impulse draws on similar themes to those that structure more rarefied cinema. A year earlier Powell and Pressburger had been responsible for the film that brooded perhaps most thoughtfully on how the bombsites were now spaces with no solid foundations that a protagonist could return to. In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) the life of the protagonist (Field Marshal Wynne Candy, played by Roger Livesey) Colonel Blimp unfolds as he moves from being a dashing officer to being seen (wrongly) as an aging reactionary.49 Its opening and closing scenes are set in bombed, Second World War, LondonÂ€– and the film itself is a portmanteau of extended flashbacks. Immediately after his marriage, Blimp promises his young wife that he will ‘never change until the floods come, and this house is a lake’; and with that biblical resonance stability and certainty seem fixed. Eventually, after her death and in the midst of the war, he returns to his old square to find that his bombed-out house has


185

vanished completely, and the basement has become a static water tank for fire-fighters. The film then gives him a meditative moment. His impulse that a liberation or change might be possible, no matter how old or seemingly set in a direction one might be, is held against the history and pain of loss. All of this occurs silently and implicitly, as Blimp, then the viewer, watches a single leaf drift on the surface of the water. So Macaulay’s novel, while isolated by her particular aesthetic and its hope in resurgent organicism, is also part of a wider genre. Indeed the depiction of violent lossÂ€ – of structures, communities and innocenceÂ€ – is implicit in any portrayal of the bombsites. The World my Wilderness expressly chooses to explore pain from a postwar perspective where the war itself is history, yet the poignancy of the bombsites comes from the major activity that still takes place there: mourning, and recognising, loss. S h a pe s of t h e pa s t In amongst the ghosts of buildings and the spectral presences of The World my WildernessÂ€– ‘the ghosts of Noble Street and Addle Street crowded to their vanished windows to watch the chase’ (WW 193)Â€– one jagged and painful sorrow, the centrality and yet inadequacy of religion, comes to the fore. In this spectral landscape the ruins of St Giles’ church become central for Barbary. Together with Raoul she reanimates it with language, by ‘preaching in French about hell fire’, and through artÂ€ – ‘I think we had better paint the church walls too. Anyhow, the altar end. It probably had a jugement dernier once, before it was bombed’ (WW 130). The space recreated is not for contemplative prayer but rather an apocalyptic Christianity, and especially the continual current of damnation in hell. The passage where Barbary unpicks the doctrine of confession and the possibility of absolution is movingly effective, both for the self-knowledge which is brutally granted to her, but also for the dramatisation of theological reasoning as provoked by the specificity of setting: ‘they surveyed the gaping shells, the broken windows into which greenery sprawled, the haunted brittle beauty, so forlorn and lost … “I shall preach,” Barbary said … “And I shall preach about hell, like Père Richaud at the Lycèe. They don’t have much hell in the English church, Ritchie says. But we’ll have hell in our church”’ (WW 58). The subject of hell is raised by Barbary at every opportunityÂ€ – with Raoul, with Jock, with MavisÂ€ – with an explicit fixation on her own personal damnation. The apparent innocence of her mock housekeeping and rubble sketching conceals her past. This has a seemingly bleak and

186

Reading the Ruins

unshakeable elision of eros and thanatos: Barbary’s partial responsibility for the murder of her mother’s second husband by the French resistance does not suffice for aligning sexual activity with death. For after her rejection of Jock’s clumsy advancesÂ€– ‘“I won’t, I hate it”’ (WW 76)Â€– allusions are dropped concerning her rape or seduction (it is never fully explicated) by a German soldier during the occupation. He was ‘a thin, fair, young face, the face of the enemy, the harsh, broken French of the conqueror, the smell of the forest in October, of wild apples and wood fires and heath … later the Maquis had killed him’ (WW 77). The adult sexual state that she is entering thus becomes from her vantage point inherently violent and sinful. The surroundings add to this continual sense of nearing the metaphorical as well as actual edge of a void; the impossibility of living in such a state without plummeting: ‘The path they walked had broken into a deep chasm, it yawned darkly before them, a pit into which unbelievers fell and lay without hope’ (WW 78). Attempting to untangle and understand this knot of sin and death is the near parodic Sir Angus, Barbary’s uncle and an ‘eminent’ psychologist who is a ‘consulting specialist in nervous ailments’ (WW 96). He meets Barbary during her stay at Arshig, opening his reductive attempt at a talking cure with an awkward attempt at an empathy he cannot properly enter into; he comments that the war in France must have been ‘pretty grim’. His determination that ‘yes, we must talk about it’ (WW 106) reminds Barbary of nothing other than Gestapo interrogationsÂ€– and precipitates her flight from Scotland back to the bombsites. Indeed, among the few things Barbary and her father can agree upon is their wariness about simple ‘faith in talk as a cure’ (WW 121). The alternative to treatment of knowledge is its entombment: the assent to the idea that actions should lie ‘forever in the deep secret pools’ (WW 110). Ways of mourning and concealing loss take many forms in the novel. Mavis, one of the gang on the bombsites, has worked previously as a messenger girl, and therefore ‘knew the ruins intimately, calling them and the many anonymous alleys that ran between them by their old names’ (WW 64). Her physical return to the sites is matched by a mental effort to recover ‘stuff’, itself a word and concept that floats liminally between the emotional and the material. After Barbary’s Scottish interlude she talks to Mavis, who then grafts memory on to the ‘mucky pits’, dragging up from them the structure of the mercantile city which comes, in her descriptions, back to polyphonic and sensual life: ‘typewriters clacking … tea being made … Mr Monty with a nosegay in his buttonhole’ (WW 173). Yet the pleasure in memory is also a mourning for loss. The three ‘delinquent’ youthsÂ€– Mavis,


187

Jock and HoraceÂ€ – lack the bohemian pleasure that Barbary and Raoul find by simple existence in the ruins. The specificity of Mavis’ past knowledge, of actually being bombed, brings bitterness at the new landscape that Â�merits only an adjectival outpouring of disgust: ‘mucky shambles … shabby bushes … smashed wall … cheap weeds’ (WW 174). The last abusive term, however, carries the seeds of an elegiac regretÂ€– for ‘weeds’, even if cheap, are appropriateÂ€– giving through metonymy the garb for mourning. The loss that is markedÂ€– or at least progressively acknowledgedÂ€– in the text is thus that of the community mourned by Mavis. The litany form that framed the bombsites in organic terms reappears again, but now these record the losses and glories of a mercantile past. This part of London was a cityscape rich in commoditiesÂ€– clothes, imitation jewellery, typewriters, umbrellasÂ€– but also contained the architectural loci that justify such efforts: the guild halls. Nearly all of these were destroyed in the Blitz, burnt out and shattered, thereby ending a chain of continuity that had stretched back to pre-modern capitalism. These edifices are reanimated and questioned in the novel by the authorial voice: ‘What careful, crafty affairs had they transacted in the Hall of the Haberdashers? … what of the Goldsmiths and the Waxchandlers?’ (WW 158). The text finds answers, and direct echoes, in the lives of the current inhabitants of this zone. This reanimation that occurs exists on a border between memorialisation and vigorous life; for contemporary existence in 1946 is also based around a bastardised version of trade, or rather a reversion to the earliest and sharpest practices: ‘“Any clothes kewps [clothing coupons]?” Mavis asked. “Not for you gorgeous” said Horace … “the rate in the pubs on my beat has gone up half a crown”’ (WW 69). The mode is to wheel and deal andÂ€– most interestinglyÂ€– steal. Mavis instructs Barbary in the rudiments of shoplifting, with the need for respectability and lipstick to disarm the social expectations of the store detectives. But while Horace, Mavis and Jock steal to liveÂ€ – ‘“you scrounge for cash”’ (WW 184)Â€ – Barbary and Raoul have different priorities, existing within an avowedly non-utilitarian, artistically indulgent, form of consumption.50 Raoul’s list for thieving is a fantasia of francophile bohemia: ‘“I will have some Gruyere. If there is none some Camembert, well matured. That is from the food department. From others I will have a corkscrew knife, a red scarf and a flute.” Barbary wrote it all down in her sketchbook’ (WW 177). The romantic aspects of the ruined world in which they live is also implied through the juxtaposition of fragments that surround them, from the charred remains of Inigo Jones’ hall to the broken statue of Milton lying blasted off his alcove. But can these fragments be rendered into a

188

Reading the Ruins

pattern; can a way of discerning value in survival be implied? The answer, of sorts, is given in the revealed knowledge of the city’s layered or palimpsestic qualities. Barbary hides in a cellar and the mannered authorial voice informs the readerÂ€– and implicitly BarbaryÂ€– that she is among the medieval bases and only a few feet above the Roman stones (WW 183). Such a vision of the city re-exposed and linked back, through narratival guidance, to past glories also drives the poet H.D.’s ‘The Walls do not Fall’ (1944), yet here it is parallelism rather than the palimpsest. For this poem works by the interlacing of bombed London with ancient Egypt: there, as here, ruin opens the tomb, the temple; enter, there as here, there are no doors: the shrine lies open to the sky, the rain falls, here, there sand drifts; eternity endures51

This historicisation of newly made wreckage, or rather its insertion into a continuum of wrecked cities, depends upon the display of layersÂ€– the cities parading their wounds as proof of a long past endured. The incisions in London were indeed remarkable, bringing to light for the first time in centuries ‘a section of Roman wall uncovered by the bombing of Cripplegate … a Gothic blocked-up door from St Vedast’s, Foster Lane … Roman relics found by Austin Friars, one of them a tile with the pawmarks of a dog in pursuit of a cat’.52 But in The World my Wilderness the surface is as important as the layers hidden and exposed; and the dominant presence on the surface is a burnt earth of blackened wood and cinders. The ash that fertilises the plants, and provides the charcoal Barbary draws with,53 came from the fire-storms of the Blitz; its origins in the destruction of the city are a permanent reminder to those who use it. The movement between the layers that makes this base materiality visible, also gives the reader a sense of the material circumstances in the composition of the text. On first entering the church in the bombsite, Barbary and Raoul are fixated by fragments of hymn books, torn and charred, scattered around; distressed texts that still allow a reader, and the author, to register their own distress. L i t e r a r y s a lvag e On the night of 10 May 1941 the last and also the most destructive air raid of the Blitz struck London. The British Museum and the House of Commons were both badly hit. So was Luxbrough House, which Â�contained


189

Macaulay’s flat and all her books and manuscripts (including a half-completed new novel and a bestiary).54 The flat and its contents were totally destroyed. Macaulay’s were not the only book losses in the Blitz; other conflagrations occurred in Paternoster Row, the traditional home to publishers, which was totally burnt out with the loss of over five million volumes.55 Mervyn Peake lost the entire print run of Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1940) when one incendiary could not be dislodged from a warehouse roof; and the whole library at Holland House was gutted. For specialist book repairers it was grim work, with wounded texts being attended to in a style that recalled the triage of the field hospital: The urgent cases did not only come from the Guildhall, but from all over London. The vellum charter of London University had been flayed by chunks of cement, early mathematical books of the sixteenth century were blasted and cut, with their backs slashed … this was by no means the worst of such cases.56

However, Macaulay’s attempt at sifting her possessions only recovered blackened fragments, and from then on a morbid preoccupation with regards to burnt texts is evident throughout her work. Immediate letters to friends mix stoicism with a nihilistic gaze into the textless void: ‘I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … My lost books leave a gaping wound in heart and mind’.57 In the Second World War the willed burning of books acted as a potent connective symbol for barbarity,58 linking the photographs of grinning Hitlerjugend in Berlin’s BodenplatzÂ€ – lit by the blazing works of ‘degenerate’ authorsÂ€ – to the Great Library in Alexandria fired in 642 ad. Such destruction also made combustible fragility even more poignant; the printed word in existence became correspondingly more precious, typified by Elizabeth Bowen’s Connie in The Heat of the Day as she ‘peers forward into the acrid smoke to read the last of the print until the flame ate it’.59 Macaulay attempted to render the experience of being lost through the destruction of a textual as well as an actual world in ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, a short story written in 1942. It is about how an act of literary salvage did not take place, and about the consequences that followed. Its value comes in the linkage of a violently destructive bombsite to the recovery of fragments in aftermath, and it thus prefigures the mode of recoveryÂ€– if not the amnesiac-greeningÂ€– of The World my Wilderness. The blackened texts that blow around Barbary in St Giles have a longer history, burnt paper having also been central to pain in the earlier story: Miss Anstruther, whose life had been cut in two on the night of May 10th 1941, so that she now felt herself a ghost, without attachment or habitation, neither of

190

Reading the Ruins

which she any longer desired, sat alone in the bed-sitting-room she had taken, a small room, littered with the grimy, broken and useless objects she had salvaged from the burnt-out ruin round the corner.60

In this short short story (only nine pages long) the setting and the subject matter are both ashy, because the important objectsÂ€– not those she did salvageÂ€– are now all apparently burnt beyond recognition: ‘there were masses of paper, charred and black and damp, which had been books … but none of it was any use now, merely drifts of burnt pages’.61 This story was written and intended for the United States as part of a demi-propagandistic volume. The plot is simple and brutal: in an air raid the eponymous heroine loses all her books, as well as all the letters from her recently dead lover. An autobiographical force seems to be the governing template. In the bombing of Luxbrough House, Macaulay’s letters to Gerald O’Donovan, her lover of over twenty years, were also lost. Such a reading that locates the personal and sexual as central, plotting Macaulay’s secretive relationship with O’Donovan alone on to the texts, brings its own limitationsÂ€ – and reduces much to unsolvable biographical speculation, or at least makes any criticism wait in the wings until the sealed boxes of Macaulay’s letters are opened.62 In the story it appears all has gone in the fire: ‘the burning words were burnt, the lines, running small and close and neat down the page, difficult to decipher, with the o’s and a’s never closed at the top, had run into a flaming void and would never be deciphered more’.63 Against such a total loss Macaulay has her protagonist remember what the letters had contained, amalgamating them into an incantatory list, very much the precursor of the lists of flowers in The World my Wilderness. All are tinged with regret, sex, exoticism and lossÂ€– as they were the locations of the lovers’ illicit holidays: The little wild strawberries at Andorra la Vieja, the mountain pass that ran down to it from Ax, the winding road down to Seo d’Urgel and Spain. Lerida, Zaragoza, little mountain towns in the Pyrenees, Jaca, Saint Jean Pied-du-Port, the little harbour at Collioure, with its painted boats, morning coffee out of red cups at Ville-franche, tramping about France in hot July … Baedeker starred places because we ought to see them, he wrote, I star them because we saw them together, and those stars light them up forever.64

By the close of the story Miss Anstruther is however ‘clutching’ a surviving fragment she has found. With a melodramatic twist the words that survive on the shard of burnt paper are those from an accusatory letter when the lovers had attempted to part years before: ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don’t care twopence; if you did you would …’65 That this material document of betrayal has alone survived the blaze would appear


191

bad enough, yet Macaulay manages to circle back to deadly materiality for the close of the story. The ashy life that Miss Anstruther will now live has a blank terror of survival without hope, with the conclusion returning again to her ‘ghost’-like state, which is now made directly analogous to the ashes: Later she took another flat. Life assembled itself around her again; kind friends gave her books; she bought another typewriter, another wireless set, and ruined herself with getting necessary furniture, for she would get no financial help until after the war. She noticed little of all this that she did, and saw no reason for doing any of it. She was alone with a past devoured by fire and a charred scrap of paper which said you don’t care twopence, and then a blank, a great interruption, an end. She had failed in caring once, twenty years ago, and failed again now, and the twenty years between were a drift of grey ashes that were once fire, and she a drifting ghost too. She had to leave it at that.66

Scavenging the ashes, Miss Anstruther fails to find anything affirmative beyond damp and tattered shards. In real life Macaulay’s war life and work proceeded, as she produced a history of Portugal and re-established her position as a writer. But for years afterwards the loss shaped both the writing she produced and its form. A key moment in recovery came with the gift of a complete Oxford English Dictionary, the primary source and vital storehouse, in her view, for any literary endeavour: ‘My darling Dictionary again … I begin to feel I can live again. My O.D. was my Bible, my staff, my entertainer my help in work and my recreation in leisure. Nothing else serves.’67 Recompense was never total however; in a talk on her lost library for the BBC in 1949 she returned again to the problem of the list as a form that both itemises a past and reveals a loss: ‘When the first stunned shock begins to pass, one knows that something must be done about lost books. One makes lists. A list of the books one had; that is the saddest list, and perhaps one should not make it …’68 The movement from ‘Miss Anstruther’ to The World my Wilderness is not only a movement of years and of scaleÂ€– but also of intent. Questions of what happens to fragments and fragmented words, how they can be salvaged or used, are very different in her novel, for there they become a totalising and dominant force. Moreover, an understanding of The World my Wilderness, on a metatextual level, can only really come with an understanding of the motive behind the form, the way in which fragments of recovered texts are studded throughout the novel, like structural debris under an artfully deceptive surface. The range of material Macaulay uses stretches across a wide spectrum, but there are repeated favourites. Barbary’s musings on what remains of the foundations and

192

Reading the Ruins

cellars from this ‘great habitation of merchants’ are explained through the reuse of Pepy’s diary for 2 September 1666Â€– although he is not credited (indeed no authors are): ‘We saw the fire grow … in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’ (WW 158). Some quotations are burnished and displayed, either delivered by characters or by the authorial voice. But many more are hidden and embedded, and these range from Thomas Traherne to passages from the King James Bible, and, perhaps most intriguingly, to some lines from Andrew Marvell. Purely metaphysical conceits sit ill at ease in this wasteland, but the sexual and organic energy of Marvell finds an echo. The starkest line lifted directly is from ‘To his coy Mistress’, wrenched to fit an entire long-gone merchant class: ‘their quaint honour turned to dust, and to ashes all their lust’ (WW 183). Here a previous metaphor is rendered, through Blitz, into a truism, but it manages to imply, through its inclusion, a longevity of texts that focus on the transience of corporeal human desire. Moreover it sets off a chain of reverberations that move beyond death into the bucolic. For what is the luscious mix of ripened blackberries and hidden hen’s eggs but a reworked yet fruitful gardenÂ€– perhaps containing Marvell’s ‘vegetable love’Â€– and replete with sexualised superabundance while also hinting at a human fallen state: ‘stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared by flowers I fall on grass’.69 T h e mode r n i s t f r ag m e n t di s pl a y e d The plethora of hints towards intertextuality, and glimpses of submerged, already fragmentary forms in The World my Wilderness are overshadowed by the centrality of one poet: T. S. Eliot. Eliot was part of Macaulay’s circle, but not a close friend, and he had frequently met her in literary London of the 1930s through editorial and BBC radio work. In a Festschrift to celebrate his seventieth birthday in 1958, she offered an assessment of his influence on her work after reading The Waste Land. She suggested one encountered ‘a landscape one knew, had always known, sometimes without knowing it … T. S. Eliot’s poetry is not characteristic of our age, except insofar as it has shaped the age’s poetic expression’.70 In The World my Wilderness an epigram from himÂ€ – eleven lines taken out of ‘What the Thunder Said’ replete with blackened walls, bats with baby faces and empty chapelsÂ€– provides a literary authorisation to the work. Direct quotes scattered throughout the novel then refine and deepen the


193

structural uses to which he is being put. The first of these occurs with the reworking of a rhetorical question from Eliot, ‘Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, out of this stony rubble?’ (WW 129), now being answered sharply by ‘But you can say, you can guess, that it is yourself, your own roots … the branches of your own being that grow from this and nowhere else’. A lamentation is spun into an affirmation of life as the bombsite Maquis. It is a positivist answer of sorts. This process then sitesÂ€– as well as citesÂ€– human presence as equally part of the wreckage, giving a symbiosis of material and human debris, each reliant on the other. While use of The Waste Land authenticates this schema, it cannot hold it in a fixed position, and a trope of regression becomes central; for Macaulay’s key source text, used in redolent fragments, is concerned itself primarily with fragmentation. Macaulay’s fragments are, however, recontextualised to serve a very different aim to that of Eliot; she utilises a work of high modernism fixated on the aftermath of the First World War to make sense of the end of the Second, and thus brings both a faith in the restorative and the insightful power of literature into play. It is also a direct reflection on modernism. For Macaulay’s technique of bricolaging quotes together here is resolutely anti-scholarly; it wishes a reader to understand that there is a frame of reference and a literary lineage, but it does so without giving details or suggestions of Â�significanceÂ€– and, in cultural terms, without wishing to claim an authority bequeathed by such other works. David Jones this is not. The anti-scholarly mode of the characters also leadsÂ€ – consciously or not on the part of MacaulayÂ€– towards the problem of dramatised falsification or creation. For some of what initially appears to be interpolated quotation and resonant phrases from past centuries are, in fact, the work of Macaulay herself. Indeed, it could be argued that she writes the literary forger as heroine into the text, for Barbary’s mother HelenÂ€– the ‘comfortable ironic hedonist’Â€– takes pleasure in the faking of Provençal poetry. Her son confronts her: ‘“Mummy” he said now, “I believe you’re a fraud. You never found any poems, did you? You’ve made them up.”’ Helen’s response admits no shame: ‘“Of course, dear. But don’t tell anyone. It will get by until someone wants to see the manuscripts, or wants them returned to Vigeois. So far nobody has; which just shows the lazy, corrupt state French Provençal scholarship has got into”’ (WW 90). Macaulay had a history of forgery herself. In 1934 she had included a poem entitled ‘The Chase’ in an anthology of seventeenth-century verse she was editing. Later, when John Hayward wanted to consult her sources for the poem, she was forced to admit her fraud:

194

Reading the Ruins

Unfortunately you happened on the only thing in that book which is not quite as it seems … The fact is I wanted a poem about women hunting and couldn’t lay my hands on one at the moment, so I thought I would write one myself, and it amused me to put it into 17th-century garb and date it ‘c. 1675’. (After all how many years may circa cover? I thought perhaps 260 years or so).71

Just as she had written that poem herself, she composed the Â�purportedly sixteenth-century anonymous epigram to The World my Wilderness. The status and provenance of the texts woven into the novel now appear compromised and more complex. The literary precedents for the characters’ names are in a similar vein. Barbary’s name appears in an ambiguous Shakespearean aside: de s de mon a : My mother had a maid called Barbary. She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of willow. An old thing ’twas, but it expressed her fortune â•…â•…â•… And she died singing it.72

Salvaged from Shakespeare, not as a character but as a reference to a character, and thus another story of a lost foliage-filled lament (not all willows weep but this one might), the name ‘Barbary’ manages to retain an aura of intrigue and possibility. This covers sexuality, falsity and loss, and is compounded with the wider meanings of the word: a name for those from Africa or Persia who threatened ancient GreeceÂ€ – barbaros, barbarian.73 A creature who is happy amid ruins. The salvage gang, with their huge cave of loot at the edge of London Wall, do not however see her as a threat. To them she is just another lost girl and they nourish her with tea; they are already converting the ruins into practical productivity, Â�growing tomatoes in the ashes. Acts of pity can also be acts of recognition. Adrift in London Barbary is herself only possibly salvageable, a fact that frightens her father: ‘He had hoped, out of the embittering and humiliating wreck of his first marriage to have salvaged a son and a daughter … would the daughter eventually qualify as salvage, or would [she] remain drifting with the wreckage?’ (WW 139). This movement in his sentence, as ‘salvage’ is dragged from being a verb to a tangible, recoverable and ultimately tameable noun, can stand as emblematic of the tensions in the novel. The same process of shifting across grammatical forms occurs with the polyvalenced nature of the words ‘loot’ and ‘wreck’ at other points in the novel, as these also offerÂ€– depending on their contextÂ€– both recovery and disaster. So perhaps, but only perhaps, Barbary can herself be posited as literary salvage and understood as an adaptable (near daemonic) avatar of the new, post-Blitz, age of wreckage.


195

Whatever she is, Barbary remains a creature of the ruins, in a fragmentary world filled with continual exposure to shards of the past. In the novel these remains are never viscerally blood, for dead men only walk as ghosts or are known through memories, not described as Macaulay saw them when working as an ambulance driver: ‘jammed [are] those who lived there; some call out, crying for rescue. Others are dumb’.74 Until, that is, the last sequence of the novel, with the proprietorial walk that Barbary’s brother Ritchie makes through the bombsites. Here Eliot emerges again as both a touchstone for civilisation and the acknowledgement of barbarism, as Ritchie quotes him ‘with a shudder’ that gives a physical index to the potency of the words: ‘“I think we are Rat’s Alley where the dead men lost their bones”’ (WW 253). An understanding of deathÂ€– and beyond death, nullityÂ€– seems to complete the work. But in all the archaeological strata he notes the professionalisation of attempts at recovery around him: ‘Excavators had begun their tentative work, uncovering foundations, seeking the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Londinium, Rome … a civilised intelligence was at work among the ruins’ (WW 252). While the cultural fragmentsÂ€– the poemÂ€– that Ritchie unearths allows him an aesthetic take, the scene implies death. The civilised intelligence at workÂ€– careful, egalitarianÂ€– seeks not a moral or heavenly understanding, but rather order, ready for the construction of a new London, another layer, above all the wreckage. P o s t wa r pl e a s u r e s a n d f e a r s A fixation with discerning meaning from fragments, and understanding the complications of the partial and the covered, remain central themes for Macaulay in her The Pleasure of Ruins (1953). This was the book she started writing immediately after completing The World my Wilderness, and it is, in many ways, a complementary text that completes a trilogy started with the short story ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’. For The Pleasure of Ruins is as much concerned with the literary and aesthetic interpretation of ruins as with ruins themselves, and it is especially interested in salvaÂ� ging past views, viewers or records of ‘ruin pleasure’ that have been lost or fragmented. Even the title of the book is extracted from an aside of Henry James: ‘[t]o delight in the aspects of sentimental ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity’.75 It is also compiled with the express purpose of being of intellectual and aesthetic (if not practical) useÂ€– a field guide for amateurs written by someone who has had personal experience of taking pleasure from ruins despite

196

Reading the Ruins

knowing their histories of destruction. It is a vast compendium of why and how peopleÂ€– especially writers and artistsÂ€– have gained enjoyment from contemplating vestiges and transience. Macaulay parries possible criticism before beginning: ‘The approach to ruins in this highly selective book will be seen to be that of a pleasurist’. Indeed it is, with ‘archaeology and antiquarianism’ largely buried beneath aesthetic contemplation and individual narratives.76 But the permanently metamorphosing nature of ruins is the leitmotif, as Macaulay draws attention to the problem of any attempt to frame a view or singular significant moment: Ruins change so fast that one cannot keep pace: they disintegrate, they go to earth, they are tidied up, excavated, cleared of vegetation, built over, restored, prostrate columns set on end and fitted with their own or other capitals; fresh areas of ancient cities are exposed, scattered ruins assembled together in railed enclosures, ruin-squatting populations expelled from castles and abbeys, walls repaired.77

The rest of the introduction attempts to define how subjective transience can be approached: ‘one must select for contemplation some phase in a ruin’s devious career, it matters little which, and consider the human reaction to this; or merely enjoy one’s own’.78 Within the main text, as it ranges across the vast sweep of ruins in history from the Romans to the twentieth century, the ruins of the bombsites lurk perpetually as a corollary for other forms of destructionÂ€– and as personal justification for the entire intellectual project. Sometimes this is overt. In the introduction the ghost of Marie Lloyd is here again with her music-hall song ‘I am very, very fond of ruins, ruins I love to scan’, the same melody which is sung by Mavis over the bombsites in The World my Wilderness (WW 71).79 The thematically organised chapters range across Europe and beyond, finding dialogues with the past that is ‘jungled over with a tangle of green’.80 Macaulay’s general mode of investigation, finding growth and fluctuation in every apparently forlorn and terminally entropic wreck, is akin to one well identified by Robert Ginsberg when he writes ‘[t]he ruin reserves the right to challenge preservation … unlike the intact structure, the ruin is in process. To stop what is happening to the ruin may not be protecting it’.81 Macaulay’s final chapterÂ€– ‘A Note on New Ruins’Â€ – is her most passionate and difficult. It attempts to illustrate her desire to see the aftermath of the Second World War, and its bombsites, through the historical frame of ruins as themselves in flux: with the cultural value that then accords to them as testimony to a specific moment. The balanÂ�cing act that she attempts to explain is between a callous enjoyment that treats them as any other shattered structure, and


197

a desire to clear them away as they are reminders of war and suffering: ‘New ruins have not yet acquired the weathered patina of age, the true rust of the baron’s wars … new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn they smell of fire and mortality.’82 She falls back on a renewed understanding of ruins in history, made and unmade by time, and needing a mantle of green that will allow their pain to be ‘enjungled and engulfed’.83 The success of The Pleasure of RuinsÂ€– frequently reprinted and also reissued in a shortened and illustrated form84Â€– represents just part of the postwar engagement with the ruin, and especially with ideas that the vegetation cloaking a city in fragments could be as interesting as the stones beneath. In the postwar years this concept entered the culture in many ways, but one hitherto untheorised strand was the dialogue British science fiction began to have with the bombsites’ verdancy. T r i f f i d s i n t h e u nof f ic i a l c ou n t r y s i de The Second World War strongly affected the conditions of possibility for British fiction in the 1950s; from the assumptions that most adult males would have a familiarity with firearms, to the continual recourse to tropes of bomb fear, such as that present in the opening to this very early John Wyndham short story. The family is in a moment of ordered stillness when [t]he house shook, the windows rattled, a framed photograph slipped off the mantelshelf and fell into the hearth. The sound of a crash somewhere outside arrived just in time to drown the noise of breaking glass. Graham Toffs put his drink down carefully, and wiped the spilt sherry from his fingers. ‘That sort of thing takes you back a bit,’ he observed. ‘First instalment of the new one would you think?’85

Wyndham’s ruins in his novels of the 1950s also look strangely similarÂ€– for they are nothing less than an extrapolation of the bombsites that were around him as he wrote. The wild green of nature is back in the city, and it still conveys menace. The apotheosis of this plant fear is reached in one of his postwar texts that takes barely recovered blitzed London as its terrain, and then subjects it to another attack. The Day of the Triffids (1951) supposes an apocalyptic calamityÂ€– mass blindnessÂ€– being followed by the triumph of a futuristic yet primordially resilient plant. For the sighted survivors, the maquisard is the only position available, as the rest of the newly blinded society lapses into epidemic-ridden chaos. The survivors make forays into London in the years after the disaster; but the jungle of

198

Reading the Ruins

plants that now covers the city, rather than giving concealment to an earlier terror, now is the terror: For safety’s sake I let a whole year pass until I went to London again … The place still contrived to give the impression that a touch of a magic wand would bring it to life again … [But] grass and weeds had a good hold in the gutters and were choking the drains. Leaves had blocked downspoutings so that more grass, and even small bushes, grew in the cracks and in the silt in the roof guttering. Almost every building was beginning to wear a green wig beneath which the roofs would damply rot. Through many a window one had glimpses of fallen ceilings, curves of peeling paper, and walls glistening with damp. The gardens of the parks and squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets. Growing things seemed to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgement even in the seats of abandoned cars. On all sides they were encroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created.86

The city is now at the mercy of an inexorable process from ‘creeping’, ‘rooting’ and ‘encroaching’ plants, and this is before a Triffid has even been sighted. Later in the novel Bill, the main protagonist, tries to understand his position as a new Adam of the Sussex coastal stripÂ€– ‘“[t]he countryside is having its revenge all right”’Â€– and his girlfriend responds with laconic understatement: ‘“It rather frightens me. It’s as if everything were breaking out.”’87 Her stuttering gesture at totalising fear here in the ‘everything’ is symptomatic of a fatalistic strain in Wyndham’s prose that always lies beneath the conventionality of his narrative form and the stolid selfpresence of his characters; it is one that is frequently ignored in attempts to pigeonhole him as merely a chronicler of the ‘cosy-catastrophe’.88 Yet the Ozymandias quoting, civilisation despising minor figure of Coker is as close as Wyndham comes to putting such nihilism into the text. Other less nuanced works of ecological catastrophe, such as John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), mix bleakness with a literal lack of faith in pastoral recuperation. Across other literary forms a definite influence can be tracked of the power of the lush bombsite as tutelary. A moral glee at the retaliation of nature, and one that seems to come directly from Wyndham, is also reflected in Richard Mabey’s workÂ€– stretching back from Weeds (2010) to his unconventional but influential natural history The Unofficial Countryside (1973). Written in the first flush of seventies eco-awareness, this rambling excursion around the liminal spaces of London subverts a binary city–nature divide by concentrating on spaces such as bombsites. A broken car left in a gravel pit somewhere near Stoke Newington looks initially like an intruder in a nouveau-bucolic scene:


199

but there were more miraculous healing forces at work. Sidling over the bonnet and poking up through the hole where the windscreen had been, were sweep upon sweep of spotted orchid, in every shade of pink. This most delicate of flowers, hounded by the new roads and car-borne trippers, had found refuge amongst the clutter, and was having its revenge.89

A combination of specificity, recuperative pastorality and the possibilities of apparently ruined ground is pressed again into culture through an inventory of flowers. The apotheosis of Wyndham’s own trajectory of plant fascination and fear would come in his most developed novel The Chrysalids (1955), with its portrayal of new wildwoods that have grown up around radioactive cities in North America. Set a few thousand years in the future, in postapocalypse rural Labrador, it features a religious community who fear and condemn the mutations that exist in these ‘Fringes’. Such liminal lands are beyond a re-established civilisation, but they are zones where the ruins of the old culture are submerged beneath the forests. This novel’s causal relationship, where ruins give rise directly to the terrifying nature of the vegetation, sets out an approach taken up by other writers of imagined futures. J. G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962) is also dominated by mutant vegetation, and it is portrayed as it reconquers semi-submerged cities. Here the mega-flora of tree ferns and the reawakened jungles of dense 300-foot canopies elide any trace of the conurbation beneath. As the protagonist himself notes at the opening of the novel: ‘his holding unit would complete their survey of the city (had it once been Berlin, Paris or London? Kerans asked himself)’.90 This parenthetical aside fits with this apparently terminal state of revegetation that unifies all: ‘Kerans could remember the unending succession of green twilights that had settled behind them as he and Riggs moved slowly northward across Europe, leaving one city after another, the miasmic vegetation swamping the narrow canals and crowding from roof-top to roof-top.’91 The action and observations of these characters in the lagoon that covers this particular city bring back specificity. Once drained and pumped dry, the particularities of life are exposed: ‘he gazed out brightly at the emerging streets in the dim light around them, the humped backs of cars and buses appearing through the surface’. Only then, after over a hundred pages, is the reader granted knowledge of the city’s identity: ‘[g]iant anemones and starfish flopped limply in the shallows, collapsing kelp struggled out of windows. Numbly Bodkin said: “Leicester Square”.’92 This form of recolonisation of the city by resurgent primordial forms is, however, welcomed by the protagonist. It is the corollary to the mental processes he is undergoing: the

200

Reading the Ruins

regrowth of primitive vegetation is matched by his unearthing of a new form of time that is now perceivable, biological rather than simply chronological, and this biological time is much older than humankind: The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae … is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and the Triassic Eras.93

Such totalising visions emphasise human vulnerability, implying a wish to understand what a post-human future might resemble, also emerge in seemingly unrelated areas. While other Ballard works presuppose potential futures where trips to former nuclear test sites are logical and desirable choices, the actuality of contemporary leisure practices have proceeded to outstrip them. The growth of ‘extreme tourism’ reaches an apogee in the organised trips now run to the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl reactor, taking in the 30-kilometre central area that has been abandoned since Reactor 4 exploded in 1986. The radioactively burnt ‘red forest’, lines of contaminated machinery and the sarcophagus that covers the shell of the concrete containment building are only the supporting attractions; the central days of these tours are spent in the abandoned city of Pripyat.94 Now overgrown, mainly with birch, willow and alder, the crumbling Soviet architecture combines cold war chic with a distinct pleasure in ruins. Films and websites, with their fetishising of before and after images, are dedicated to these tours; they circle around the quality of Pripyat as a template for the life of post-human cities to comeÂ€– including, as the graffiti left by one British tourist testifies, London.95 Such a desire to continue to imagine the engulfing jungle also has features in contemporary popular non-fiction. A best-selling dystopic prediction from 2007 revels in Macaulay-esque descriptions of the incremental advance of vegetation. Here, though, the subject city is New York. Ruins of high-rises echo the love songs of frogs breeding in Manhattan’s reconstituted streams, now stocked with alewives and mussels dropped by seagulls … Rising water, tides and salt erosion have replaced the engineered shorelines circling New York’s five boroughs with estuaries and small beaches. With no dredging Central Park’s ponds and reservoir have been reincarnated as marshes. Without natural grazersÂ€– unless horses used by hansom cabs and by park policemen managed to go feral and breedÂ€– Central Park’s grass is gone. A maturing forest is in its place, radiating down former streets and invading empty foundations.96


201

Described here is a vista of destruction, one that no human could everÂ€– by its very rationale for existingÂ€– glimpse or appreciate. But it is mapped out in sensuous terms of environmental resurrection, ‘reconstitu[tion]’ or, to make the spiritual visible, ‘reincarnation’. Only a few traces of a militarised template for understanding the deserted city remain, hidden or lurking within the lexical rather than the actual jungle, given away only by terms such as ‘invading’. T h e e n v i ron m e n ta l t u r n, p o s t mode r n i t y, a n d b ac k t o t h e b om b s i t e The eclectic texts attended to in this chapter relate directly to each other thematically: from Jefferies’ After London; through Macaulay’s various attempts to make sense of ruins both before and after they have been engulfed by jungle; right up to Ballard’s regressive play in The Drowned World, proposing that primitive fern forms are within as well as without. Despite their focus on what happens when or if nature reinvades the city, rendering mankind impotent if not extinct, they have not been previously subjected to any systematic critique. Perhaps most surprisingly, despite unambiguous warnings from science and popular science worksÂ€– Â�typified perhaps by the directness of the title The Sixth Extinction97Â€– such texts have been all but ignored by the contemporary ‘ecological turn’ in recent literary criticism. This is despite their offering material that is both rich and problematically redolent. The possibility that texts where the city is recolonised by nature, with the inhabitants vanished, might become a way of understanding the potential for ecological destruction, has been evaded by various modes of eco-criticismÂ€– despite a plethora of attempts to understand an environmental context for culture. One immediate explanation for this lacuna could be the American origins of the movement, for despite a range of figures having engaged with the possibilities of a particularly British mode of alertness to ecologicalÂ€– as well as literaryÂ€– nuance, the conceptual framework is still decisively American. This can be seen through a figure such as Lawrence Buell, who convincingly posits at the centre of alert contemporary criticism the Â�problem of ‘toxic discourse’; that is the proliferation of texts that express full-spectrum anxiety from ‘the perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency’.98 Over the course of a chapter he calmly annotates the way in which literary texts participate in the fear and helplessness generated by an understanding that the localÂ€– and globalÂ€– environment is being irrecoverably altered. From the

202

Reading the Ruins

reportage of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) through to Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985) and Todd Hayes’ film Safe (1995) the forms of fear, and the possibility of language to address or evade them, are charted. Buell does approach ideas of utter self-elision as both longed-for and terrifying in his earlier work The Environmental Imagination (1995). Yet here it is done obliquely through a consideration of the specificity of American literary forms, and it appears as a wary pacing around questions of ‘environmental apocalypticism’ and how it can serve both to permit continual indulgence and relieve us of agency for change.99 The sublime emptiness of the city without us, as well as being a populist and portentous trope in films and genre fiction, speaks more frighteningly of a nature resilient to, and thus not needing, our efforts to intercede on its behalf. Beyond Buell, varieties of complex, and apparently more apocalyptic, modes of eco-criticism find a use in thought experiments of human extinctionÂ€– and therefore a value in texts that seek to expand what a cityscape without its creators might mean. Arne Naess, the Swedish philosopher and founder of the ‘deep ecology’ movement, argued for an overthrow of norms of what we can expect a human landscape to resemble if the coming crisis is not averted. In his manifesto Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (1986) he starts to expand on the difficulty of imagining what extinction might be like, and thus why anthropocentrism is difficult to overcome. He then lays down a series of maxims for what a deep ecological position would be, including the attitude that ‘so called simple, lower or primitive forms of plants and animals contribute essentially to the richness and diversity of life. They have value in themselves and not merely as steps towards so called rational or higher life forms’.100 To understand them properly and without the imposition of a false Â�teleology, we have to be able to imagine ourselves gone. To apply a Swedish mountain-climbing ‘deep ecologist’ perspective to the liberal-humanist works of Rose Macaulay would seem, initially, perverse in the extreme. Yet if the continuing legacy of writing throughÂ€– and fromÂ€– the bombsites is to be valued it must form a part, uncomfortable and complicating, of any attempt to understand the construction of ‘Nature’ in contemporary Â�writingÂ€– and especially the problem of nature within a city that provokes or inspires art.

Coda

When the novelist Sarah Waters wished to move from her elegant pas tiches of Victoriana to a rather more modern narrative, she set The Night Watch (2006) in London during the Second World WarÂ€– and its after math (but with time running backwards from 1947 to 1944, and ultimately to 1941). Bombs fall and characters run, hide and make love. One, notably, is an ambulance driver, emulating Rose Macaulay’s job throughout the Blitz. Macaulay is herself credited as an influence by Waters, especially for the correlation of moral and physical chaos.1 Alongside the reversed unspooling of the narrative comes another part of the novel’s revisionist manoeuvre, since it offers thoughts from characters that could not have been admitted to, let alone published, in the 1940s. This comes to particu lar visibility in the attitudes to the bombsites they live and workÂ€amongst: Julia picked up the cups and led Helen a little way off, to a heap of sandbags under neath a boarded window. The bags had the sun on them; they smelt, not unpleas antly, of drying jute. Some had split and showed pale earth, the limp remains of flowers and grass. Julia pulled on a broken stalk. ‘“Nature triumphÂ�ant over war”,’ she said, in a wireless voice; for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radioÂ€– the new variety of wild flowers they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of thatÂ€– it had got terribly boring.2

This scene is more complicated than it might initially appear; for it is both a salutary corrective to the romanticisation of the bucolic bombsiteÂ€– and yet it is only possible because such rhetoric of organicist transform ation, perhaps the most disconcerting part of a modernist inheritance, and (over)loaded with political and aesthetic import, was present when the novel was setÂ€– and is still recognisable to us now. ReadingÂ€– and writingÂ€– the ruins of war requires the material spaces cut violently into the city fabric to be acknowledged and understood. This book has concentrated on a British, London-centric, set of writers and artistsÂ€– and it has purposely not engaged with the actual or potential bombsites of a post-1945 era of nuclear weapons. For after 1945 any discussion of ruins of 203

204

Reading the Ruins

the city needs to acknowledge the horror of the atomic sublimeÂ€– and the human costÂ€– from Hiroshima and Nagasaki onwards. It must also con sider the ways in which the portrayal of this new order of potential violence utilised some past tropes as it moved from reportage to morality fable. The journalist John Hersey’s Hiroshima reports in the New Yorker in the imme diate aftermath of the atomic bombings wove together testimony, biog raphy and a feel for the strangely redemptive power of natureÂ€– with wiry plants growing again in the blast shadowsÂ€– in these spaces of destruction.3 But the potential of nuclear weapons was that of creating cityscapes beyond knowable ruinsÂ€ – or, to be rather more bleakly accurate, no cityscape at all. The multitude of conventionally bombed cities since 1945Â€– including Seoul, Hanoi, Kabul, Tehran, Baghdad, and BelgradeÂ€– provides images of horror understandable within the discourse of the bombsite, but remains merely a portent of the potential, knowable rehearsal for utter erasure. An emblematic moment comes perhaps from the Trinity bomb test on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Here the heat of the exploded deviceÂ€– ‘gadget’Â€– fused the desert sand into a gargantuan sheet of greenblack glass. This substance was known subsequently as ‘Trinitite’. A series of brittle glassy atomic tablelands were subsequently to be found at the French test ranges in North Africa and at Semipalatinsk in the USSR.4 The bathetic afterlife of trinititeÂ€– which was broken up for mildly radio active tourist souvenirsÂ€– should not hide its symbolic value. The reflect ive glossy plateau of deadly nullity represents the ultimate break into postmodernism, the carcinogenic sublime, the bombsite ruin as showing merely surface sheen rather than possessing depth, resonance or potential. Layers of history are now longer revealed but rather fused into a blur. Against such plateaus and fears, the actual bombsites in Britain still have aesthetic potency. While the last genuine sites in the East End were built over by the mid 1980s, their locus classicus of war evidence encoded as plants, fear, memory and hope can still be entered in fiction. The con tinual desire to take pleasure in the ruins makes them symbolic as well as actual. For the broken yet verdant landscape of the centre of London in 1945, heralded in precursors from the nineteenth century and acting as inspiration to writers ever since, represents more than a mere backdrop in the texts this book has considered. For in acknowledging how writers found flowers amid ruins, by interpreting texts dealing with the literalisa tion of fragmentation, and through sensing the compelling mutability of all matter when aflame, readers can now see a rather different history of British late modernism – and thus a rather different kind of war litera ture; it is one which drew its potency from historical specificity, material debris, and traumatic fears, and yet is only now being unearthed.

Notes

I n t roduc t ion 1 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage, 2004 [1938]), p. 153. 2 In The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945, intro. Robin Woden, ed. Anne Sanders (London: London Topographical Society, 2005), the actual maps used for recording damage in World War II are reprinted, showing the destroyed and damaged buildings reaching over 90 per cent in areas such as Poplar and the City. 3 War Pictures by British Artists: Air Raids (Oxford University Press, 1943), pp.Â€5–6. 4 The strands could be respectively typified by Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2000), and Andrew Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5 See, respectively, across different decades: Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 1999); Michael Felmingham, Ruins: A Personal Anthology (Feltham: Country Life Books, 1972); Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953). 6 See Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 7 This a dynamic typified by Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006). 8 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995). 9 Notable studies being Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999), and Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton University Press, 2004). 10 Esty expands and glosses this into the ideological contours of his project, A Shrinking Island, pp. 1–22. 11 See, respectively, Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995). 12 See, for example, Kate McLoughlin, ‘Adynaton: A War Topos’, Peer English, 1 (spring 2006), 15–24. 205

206

Notes to pages 10–12

13 See Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge, eds, British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (London: Palgrave, 2007). 14 See Kristin Bluemel, ed. Intermodernism: Writing and Culture in Interwar and Wartime Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). The list of potential ‘intermodernists’, pp. 208–24, sprawls from Christopher Caudwell to Enid Blyton, William Empson to Winifred Holtby. 15 See Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 1, for a convincing argument that there is indeed ‘A Modernism beyond the Blitz’. 16 The essay was retitled ‘At Home’ and collected in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951) and then in Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 333–6 (p. 334). 17 See Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927–1951 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 244–5. 18 Louis MacNeice, ‘London Letter 1’, in Selected Prose, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 99–105 (p. 102). 19 ‘London fights the robots’ (1944), collected in By-line Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (London: Scribner, 1967), pp. 356–63, (p. 357). 20 Cited by Woodward, In Ruins, pp. 29–30. 21 See, respectively: The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in British Culture (London: Palgrave, 2007); Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 1989). 22 Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (London: Pan, 1956 [1943]), p. 157. 23 Letter to Chester Kallaman, quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines in Auden (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 231. 24 Letter to Elizabeth Mayer, ibid. 25 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 335. 26 Mervyn Peake, ‘London, 1941’, in Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake, ed. Maeve Gilmore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 164. 1â•… I magi n i ng des t ruc t ion 1 William le Queux, The Terror of the Air (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1920), p. 79. 2 H. G. Wells, preface to the 1941 Penguin edition of The War in the Air (p. 8). 3 Cited by Patrick Wright in ‘Dropping their eggs’, London Review of Books, 21 August 2001, 11–14, 13. 4 Tom Harrison, Living through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976), p. 19. 5 Cited by Tami Davis Biddle in Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 13–14. 6 This film was re-released under a bewildering number of titles, but it started life as The Airship Destroyers. See Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859–1917 (Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 56.


207

7 See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta, 2001), section 2, n.p. 8 See Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile, 2007), pp. 65–6. 9 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Hesperus, 2002 [1902]), p. 15. 10 See Patterson, Guernica, pp. 105–8 on the attempts to have ‘air-policing’ excluded from various treaties. 11 Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (Portmeirion: Golden Dragon, 1975 [1928]), pp. 130–1, cited in http://airminded.org/2008/08/14/ come-friendly-bombs-and-fall-on-stonehenge/ [accessed April 2010]. 12 Report to David Lloyd George, 17 August 1917, cited in Blood, Tears and Folly by Len Deighton (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 327. 13 Letter to John Middleton Murray, 21 March 1915, cited in Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War, p. 72. 14 Ibid., p. 73. 15 See, luridly but with great detail, Neil Hanson, The First Blitz: The Secret Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). 16 Patterson, Guernica, p. 91. 17 Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford University Press, 1992 [1925]), p.Â€17. 18 Ibid. 19 The significance of the aircraft and the symbolics of flight can be tracked throughout her career. See, as one point of departure, Gillian Beer ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 265–90. 20 C. B. H. Liddell Hart, Paris; or, The Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), p. 42. 21 Joseph O’Neill, Day of Wrath (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 240. 22 For example see Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, ch. 2, pp. 69–127. 23 J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson, 1923), p. 150. 24 Martin Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War’, in Class Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, ed. Frank Glovermith (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 161–84 (p. 161). 25 Beyond Ceadel, other notable readings on the specifically interwar period have included: I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1992); Patterson, Guernica, especially ch. 2, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’; and Wright, ‘Dropping their eggs’, 11–14. 26 Le Queux, Terror of the Air, p. 9. 27 Ibid., p. 77. 28 Ibid., p. 75. 29 Biddle tracks the various lectures given in the Royal United Services Institution in London. One entitled ‘The Duties of Local Authorities in Wartime’ presupposes ‘certain danger’ from the ‘miseries of the poorer classes’ would lead to their revolt when attacked. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, pp.18–19.

208


30 Le Queux, Terror of the Air, p. 71. 31 Ibid., p. 62. 32 Leslie Pollard, Menace: A Novel of the Near Future, (London: T. Erner Laurie, 1935), p. 57. 33 Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok (London: Duckworth, 1926), p. 335. 34 Ibid., p. 337. 35 Ibid., p. 340. 36 Pollard, Menace, p. 5. 37 Ibid., p. 139. 38 Ibid., p. 84. 39 See Patterson, Guernica, p. 99. 40 Pollard, Menace, p. 113. 41 Ibid., p. 144. 42 Ibid., p. 15. 43 See Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008) for details of the more general metaphorical transformation. 4 4 P. R. C. Groves, ‘Our future in the air’, The Times, 21 March 1922, 13–14. 45 Wright, ‘Dropping their eggs’, 13. 46 Ladbroke Black, The Poison War (London: Stanley Paul, 1933), p. 69. 47 Ibid., p. 149. 48 Ibid., p. 262. 49 Ibid., p. 288. Also see Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) for detail on much purgative interwar hatred of the city. 50 O’Neill, Day of Wrath, p. 21. 51 Ibid., p. 189. 52 Ibid., pp. 193, 196. 53 Ibid., p. 174. 54 Shaw Desmond, Chaos (London: Hutchinson, 1938), p. 457. 55 J. B. S. Haldane, A.R.P. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 7. 56 See, for example, James S. Corum, ‘The Spanish Civil War: Lessons Learned and not Learned by the Great Powers’, Journal of Military History, 62 (1998), 313–34. 57 For details see Paul Preston, We saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (London: Constable, 2008). 58 George Steer, The Times, 28 April 1937, 17. 59 See, for example, Nicholas Rankin, Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). 60 Cited in Patterson, Guernica, p. 37. 61 Ibid., p. 17. 62 John Langdon-Davies, Air Raid: The Technique of Silent Approach, High Explosive Panic (London: Routledge, 1938), p. 14. 63 Ibid., p. 24, emphasis in the original. 64 Collected in Valentine Cunningham, ed., The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 373.


209

65 New Statesman and Nation, 13, 30 January 1937, 159; reproduced in Cunningham, Spanish Civil War Verse, pp. 100–2 (p. 101). 66 Ibid. 67 See Virginia Woolf’s reaction to such images in Three Guineas: ‘The Spanish Government sends [the photographs] with patient pertinency about twice a week. They are not pleasant photographs to look upon’. Cited and discussed in Robert Strandling, Your Children Will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 171. 68 See Taro’s May 1937 images from the hospitals and morgues of Valencia, in Gerda Taro, ed. Irme Schaber, Richard Whelen and Kriten Kubben (New York: GööICP/Steidl, 2007), pp. 114–19. 69 See Strandling, Your Children will be Next for details of the image’s provenance, pp. 3–26. 70 Francis Scarfe, Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry (London: Routledge, 1942), p. 128. 71 See Martha Fodaski, George Barker (New York: Twayne, 1969), p. 75; Robert Fraser, The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker (London: Random House, 2001), p. 112. Fraser takes Barker’s assurances and identifies the photograph as being published in the News Chronicle in March of 1939 to illustrate ‘recent air-raids on Barcelona’. No photograph matching this description was published in this time period, and as Barcelona fell to the Nationalists on 26 January, this seems implausible. George Barker, Lament and Triumph, (London: Faber, 1940), p. 71; hereafter cited parenthetically as L, followed by page numbers. 72 Poems for Spain, ed. Stephen Spender (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), p. 78. 73 Adrian Caesar, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s (Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 191. 74 Desmond Hawkins, Spectator, 62, 30 June 1939, 1140. 75 George Barker, ‘Funeral Eulogy on Garcia Lorca’, Life and Letters, 23 (October 1939), 61–5 (61). 76 Eric Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–91 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 77 Questions of problematic periodicity, artifice and the boundaries to the entire decade of the 1930s are usefully explored and acknowledged by Valentine Cunningham, Writers of the Thirties (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 12–35. 78 Henry Green, ‘Before the Great Fire’ [first published as ‘Firefighting’ in The London Magazine, 7, 1960], collected in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. Matthew Yorke (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), pp. 260–79 (p. 260). 79 See, for example, Cunningham, Writers of the Thirties, ch. 6, ‘High Failure’; David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (London: Palgrave, 1991). 80 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 [1941]), p. 5; hereafter cited parenthetically as BTA, followed by page numbers.

210


81 Cited in Hauser, Shadow Sites, p. 30. 82 Ibid., ch.1, pp. 30–56. 83 Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (London: Faber and Faber, 1998 [1939]), p. 72; hereafter cited parenthetically as AJ, followed by page numbers. 84 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 210. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., p. 211. 87 Ibid. 88 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. i, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 359–61, (p. 361). 89 Ibid. For a further discussion, see MacKay, Modernism and World War II, p. 41. 90 Woolf, Selected Essays, pp. 216–19 (p. 219). 91 Louis MacNiece, ‘Postscript to Iceland for W. H. Auden’, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Macdonald (London: Faber, 2007), pp. 95–7 (p. 97). 92 See Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, p. 114. 93 George Orwell, Coming up for Air (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1939]), p.19; hereafter cited parenthetically as CufA, followed by page numbers. 94 Henry Green, Party Going (London: Harvill, 1996 [1939]), p. 154; hereafter cited parenthetically as PG, followed by page numbers. 95 Graham Greene’s The Third Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1950]), p. 104. 96 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1937]), pp. 203–4. 97 Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1941]), p. 31; hereafter cited parenthetically as HS, followed by page numbers. 98 Nigel Jones, Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton (London: Scribner, 1991), p. 345. 99 Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia, ed. Peter Widdowson (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1999 [1939]), pp. 163–4. 100 See Jeremy Noel-Tod, ‘The Wanderings of Bloom and Bone: Ulysses, Hangover Square and the Art of Gratuity’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 236–46. 101 See, for example: Laura Coffey, ‘Memory and the Trace of History in Hamilton’s Hangover Square’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 247–58; Glyn Salton-Cox, ‘Hamilton and the Banality of Evil’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 309–31; Arnold Rattenbury, ‘Total Attainder and the Helots’, in The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. John Lucas (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1978), pp. 103–19; and Geoff Ward, ‘The Wibberlee Wobberlee Walk’, in The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, ed. Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 26–45. 102 See Harrison, Living through the Blitz, p. 41. 103 A Ministry of Health committee estimated that between one and three million hospital beds would be required, largely for the treatment of a


211

hysterical urban population, and the Home Office planned mass burials and the burning of bodies in lime. See Rawlinson, Second World War, p.71 for details. 104 Cited by Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, p. 105. 105 Ibid., p. 110. 106 Cited by Salton-Cox, ‘Hamilton and the Banality of Evil’, 321. 107 ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. ii, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), pp. 74–134. 2 â•… A me t rop olis aflame 1 William Sansom in ‘The Naked Flame’, in Fire and Water: An Anthology by Members of the NFS, ed. H. S. Ingham (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1942), p. 210. 2 See, respectively, Francis Spufford, I may be some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), and Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1985), for classic accounts of how this process occurred. 3 For a theoretical overview of different kinds, see Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan Ross (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987 [1938]); Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale: so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell vol. i, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), p. 166. 4 Piette, Imagination at War, ch. 2, pp. 39–81 offers as part of its seminalÂ€– if idosyncraticÂ€– view of Second World War literature a taxonomy, not only of what fire means to writers, but what past conglomerations and tropes might mean for the possibility of writing about fire as a phenomenon. 5 See, for example, Sebastian Knowles, A Purgatorial Flame (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 6 ‘Fireman Flower’, in Fireman Flower and Other Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1944), pp. 126–63 (pp. 126, 127); hereafter cited parenthetically as FF, followed by page numbers. 7 ‘Journey into Smoke’ (1943), in Something Terrible, Something Lovely (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), pp. 196–204 (p. 200). 8 ‘The Wall’ is only three and a half pages long. Fireman Flower, pp. 108–11. 9 See, for wildly different viewpoints, Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Short Story in England’ (1945) collected in People Places Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 310–15; Julian Maclaren-Ross, ‘The Double Death of William Cooper Makins’, collected in Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross, 1965), pp. 95–108. 10 Mengham, ‘Broken Glass’, in Fiction of the 1940s, pp. 124–33 (p. 126). 11 See A. T. Tolley, British Literary Periodicals of World War II and After (Kemptville, ON: Golden Dog Press).

212


12 ‘Coming to London XI’, London Magazine, 3:12 (December 1956), 29–37 (35). 13 After Fireman Flower the subsequent collections were Three (London: Hogarth Press, 1946) and Something Terrible, Something Lovely. 14 Stephen Spender, Citizens in War and After (London: George Harrap, 1945), p. 101. 15 Some background to its composition is given in his The Birth of a Story (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 9. 16 It was republished numerous times during the war, as well as being included in the influential anthology Components of the Scene, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 17 Rawlinson, Second World War, p. 97. 18 Collected in Something Terrible, Something Lovely, pp. 172–6 (p. 172). 19 This is one of the few signs that the allegory has roots in 1943 and Sansom’s interest in the Yugoslav partisans, an interest that becomes overt in ‘Pansovic and the Spider’. 20 Sansom, ‘Notes on Contributors’, in Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece, eds, A Map of Hearts: A Collection of Short Stories (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1944), p. 4. 21 ‘From the Water Junction’, in Schimanski and Treece, Map of Hearts, pp. 129–41 (p. 140). 22 Ibid., p. 141. 23 Sansom, ‘Journey into Smoke’, in Something Lovely, pp. 196–204 (p. 202). 24 Sansom, ‘Building Alive’, in Something Lovely, p. 71. 25 Sansom, ‘Journey into Smoke’, in Something Lovely, p. 202. 26 Sansom, ‘In the Morning’, Penguin New Writing, 20 (1944), 31–42 (31). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 32. 29 Ibid., 36. For a reading see Piette, Imagination at War, p. 45. 30 Sansom, ‘In the Morning’, 33–4. 31 Sansom, ‘Journey into Smoke’, p. 196. 32 Bowen, introduction to Sansom’s Collected Stories, in People Places Things, pp. 257–63 (p. 262). 33 Sansom, Something Lovely, Something Terrible, pp. 25–37 (p. 36). 34 William Sansom, The Body (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). 35 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘English Fiction at Mid-century’ (1953), collected in People Places Things, pp. 321–4 (p. 324). 36 Three pp. 85–96 (p. 85). 37 Louis MacNeice, Springboard, Poems 1941–1944 (London: Faber, 1944), p. 14; hereafter cited parenthetically as Sp, followed by page numbers. 38 Piette, Imagination at War, p. 39. 39 Fire and Water, pp. 13–17. 40 Ibid., p. 16. 41 Ibid., p. 14. 42 Ibid., p. 16. 43 Ibid., p. 17.


213

4 4 World within World (London: Faber, 1997 [1951]), p. 263. 45 See Julia Hell’s convincing overview in ‘Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?’, Ruins of Modernity, pp. 69–192. 46 MacNeice, Selected Prose, pp. 67–70. 47 Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber, 1965), p. 184. 48 Ibid., p. 185. 49 See Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 69–70. 50 MacNeice, ‘The morning after the blitz’, Picture Post, 3 May 1941, 9–15. 51 William Sansom, The Blitz Westminster at War (Oxford University Press, 1990 [1947]), p. 81. 52 MacNeice, ‘Morning after the blitz’, 9. 53 Ibid., p. 12. 54 Ibid., p. 10. 55 This is part of a wider tradition of war reports or despatches from London; see, for example, the work of Mollie Panter-Downes collected in London War Notes, ed. William Shawn (London: Longman, 1972). 56 MacNeice, Selected Prose, p. 135. 57 Ibid., p. 82. 58 Ibid., p. 122. 59 MacNeice, ‘Morning after the blitz’, 14. 60 For a list of the different ‘The Stones Cry Out’ broadcasts, each one taking an individual bombed building in a different city as a starting point, see R. D. Smith, ‘Radio Scripts 1941–1963’, in Time was Away: The world of Louis MacNeice, ed. Terrence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), pp. 141–8. 61 Green, ‘Before the Great Fire’, p. 260. Hereafter cited parenthetically as S, followed by page numbers. 62 Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). 63 Green’s notorious insistence on only being photographed from behind is merely the most obvious element of this self-effacement. 64 Key works of criticism that have engaged with Green in very different modes over the past thirty years would include: Rod Mengham’s still definitive The Idiom of the Time: The Writing of Henry Green (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael North, Henry Green and the Writing of his Generation (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984); MacKay, Modernism and World War II; and Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (London: Palgrave, 2007), ch. 3. 65 Henry Green, Caught (London: Harvill, 2001 [1943]); hereafter cited parenthetically as C, followed by page numbers. 66 See, for example, MacKay, Modernism and World War II, p. 99. 67 Bharat Tandon, ‘Henry Green’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, ed. Adrian Poole (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 393–406 (p. 393).

214


68 Henry Green, Pack my Bag: A Self-Portrait (London: Vintage, 2000 [1940]), p. 5. 69 Collected in Green, Surviving, p. 279. 70 Mengham, Idiom of the Time, p. 103. 71 See ibid., pp. 106–7. 72 See Piette, Imagination at War, pp. 65–76 for ways in which fire could be harnessed in terms of national myth and narrativeÂ€– and why writers resisted. 73 Collected in Green, Surviving, pp. 98–110. 74 With this comes the echoÂ€– consciously or notÂ€– of the central scene in the film Fires were Started where the different firemen enter the room as the different verses of ‘Nine Men Went to Mow’ are played by Barrett (William Sansom) on the piano. This film will be discussed in Chapter 3 below. 75 For a full discussion, see Patricia Rae, ‘Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 49:2 (summer 2003), 246–75. 76 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1928), p. 176. 77 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1953), p. 78. 78 Stephen Spender, The Destructive Elements (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 140. 79 Ibid., p. 142. 80 Stephen Spender, Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975), p. 106. 81 This comment, from a New York party at New Year 1941. Fraser, Chameleon Poet, p. 173. 82 George Barker, Seven, 1 (summer 1938), 27–8. 83 See, most obviously, Auden’s elegy to Yeats with the ‘nightmares of the dark’ descending upon Europe. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 243. 84 George Barker, ‘The Chameleon Poet’, New Republic, 110, 27 October 1941, 548. 85 George Barker, ‘Rilke’, New Statesman and Nation, 18, 19 August 1939, 276. 86 ‘Introduction’ in Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, ed., trans. and comm. J. B. Leishmann and Stephen Spender (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), p. 17. 87 Robin Skelton, ed., Poetry of the Forties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 243–5. 88 Letter to Oscar Williams dated 30 July, 1945. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Paladin, 1987), p. 561. 89 Respectively: Keydrich Rhys, ‘Introduction’, Poems from the forces: A Collection of Verse by Serving Members of the Army, Navy and Airforce (London: Routledge, 1941), p. xiii; and C. Day-Lewis, ‘Where are the War Poets?’, Penguin New Writing, 3 (February 1941), 114. 90 T. S. Eliot, ‘To the Indians who Died in Africa’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 217. 91 MacKay, Modernism and World War II, pp.71–6. 92 For some possibilities and problems in reading Thomas now, see the collected essays in Dylan Thomas (New Casebook), ed. John Goodby and Chris


215

Wigginton (London: Palgrave, 2001); or the hopes of Keith Tuma, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2002),Â€p. 384. 93 See Piette’s analysis of the problematic nature of this move, Imagination at War, pp. 245–7. 94 Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 85–6; hereafter cited parenthetically as CPT, followed by page numbers. 95 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1995 [1944]), p. 38; hereafter cited parenthetically as FQ, followed by page numbers. 96 See the notes to Thomas’ Collected Poems, p. 242. 97 See Steve Vine, ‘“Shot from the locks”: Poetry, Mourning, Deaths and Entrances’, in Dylan Thomas (New Casebook), pp. 140–57. 98 David Johnson, The City Ablaze (London: William Kimber, 1980), p. 186. 99 Ibid., p. 148. 100 Letter to Vernon Watkins, cited in notes to Collected Poems, p. 238. 101 Dylan Thomas, Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1984),Â€p. 41. 102 A. T. Davies, Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body (London: Dent, 1964), p. 18. 103 Collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, ed. John Ackerman (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), pp. 67–73 (p. 68). 104 See Piette, Imagination at War, pp. 54–67 for book-burning as both a trope and actuality. 105 See Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London: Waterstone, 1985), p. 53. 3â•… S u r r ealism a n d t he b ombsi t es 1 Evelyn Waugh, Put out more Flags (London: Chapman and Hall, 1942), p. 39. 2 T. McGreevy, review in the Studio, 120 (October 1940), p. 137; cited by Michel Remy in Surrealism in Britain (London: Ashgate, 1999), p. 211. 3 Anon., Manchester Guardian, cited in Remy, Surrealism, p. 212. 4 William Plomer, New Statesman, 19, 29 June 1940, 794. 5 The exhibition marked another stage in the dispute between Tonio del Renzio and E. L. T. Mesens over the ideological purpose and purity of British Surrealism; del Renzio later published the short-livedÂ€– one issueÂ€– magazine Arson: an ardent review. Part one of a Surrealist manifestation in March 1942. 6 McGreevy, quoted in Remy, Surrealism, p. 211. 7 Inez Holden, It was Different at the Time (London: John Lane, 1943), p. 69. 8 Patterson also uses Holden in Guernica, pp. 151–2. 9 For an insight into these portents see, for example, Jason Harding, ‘Experiment in Cambridge: “A Manifesto of Young England”’, Cambridge Quarterly, 27:4, 287–309. 10 David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Enitharmon, 2000 [1935]), p. 57.

216


11 Remy, Surrealism, p. 74. 12 The complexities and transformations of Surrealism as it arrived in Britain from Europe throughout the 1930s have recently been ably dissected, notably by Remy, Surrealism; Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971); and Peter Nicholls in ‘Surrealism in England’, in Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus, eds, The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 396–416. 13 Explored by Rod Mengham in ‘Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge’, New Formations, 44 (autumn 2001), 26–33. 14 Morton Zabel, a contributor to Poetry (Chicago), captured this well: ‘it kept old men from Lord’s cricket ground, young men from Henley and Mayfair Damsels from garden parties’. Cited by Ray in Surrealist Movement, p. 141. 15 From ‘Meetings with Benjamin Fondane’, Selected Prose 1934–1996, ed. Roger Smith (London: Enitharmon, 1998), p. 135. 16 Surrealism, ed. Herbert Read (London: Faber, 1936). 17 Sykes-Davies quoted in Nicholls, ‘Surrealism in England’, p. 405. 18 Roger Roughton, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 4–5 (August/September 1936), 74–5. 19 Gascoyne, Short Survey of Surrealism, p. 62. 20 Gascoyne, ‘Poetry and Reality’ (May 1936) in Selected Prose, p. 135. 21 ‘Anthropology at home’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, p. 12. 22 Mengham, ‘Bourgeois News’, 27. 23 Remy, Surrealism, p. 102. 24 See Harrison, Living through the Blitz for details of how Mass-Observation was used to monitor morale. 25 Ibid., p. 103. 26 Ibid., pp. 128–9. 27 Ray, Surrealist Movement in England, p. 272. 28 George Barker, Calamiterror (London: Faber, 1937), p. 37. 29 See, for example, the introduction to Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, pp. 3–45. 30 See, for example, the barbs of G. W. Stonier, in his review of Barker in ‘Three poets’, New Statesman, 13, 29 May 1937, ‘the influences of the surrealists and Mr Thomas are all too clear’ (896). 31 Barker, ‘X stanzas’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 4–5 (August 1936), 92–4. 32 Dylan Thomas, ‘The Burning Baby’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 1 (May 1936), 10–14. 33 Calamiterror, p. 14. 34 Variants of this move are made in Nicholls, ‘Surrealism in Britain’, p. 414; Remy, Surrealism, p. 101; and Ray, Surrealist Movement, p. 277. 35 Cited in Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 169–70. 36 Nicholls, ‘Surrealism in England’, p. 414. 37 For details of the manifestos, letters, meetings and expulsions, see Remy, Surrealism, pp. 209–16 and pp. 224–8.


217

38 See, for example, Tyrus Miller, ‘Documentary / Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity in the 1930s’, Modernism/modernity, 9:2 (2002), 225–41. 39 Though his Christianity owed much to encounters with Jouve it also related to a very specific suburban sublime that can be characterised as quintessentially English. In conversation Gascoyne mentioned Stanley Spencer’s Cookham murals as a counterpart to his own writings. Personal interview, June 1999. 40 Gascoyne, introduction to Poets of Tomorrow, Third Selection (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 25. 41 Gascoyne’s account of the collaboration is explicated in an essay from 1989, ‘PL Editions and Graham Sutherland’, which is included in Selected Prose, pp. 263–9. 42 See for example portents and critiques in Langdon-Davies, Air Raid or The Nature of the Air Threat, a pamphlet from the Air Raid Defence League, 1939. 43 David Gascoyne, Collected Journals, 1936–42 (London: Skoob Books, 1991), p. 262. 4 4 David Gascoyne, Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 119; hereÂ� after cited parenthetically as SP, followed by page numbers. 45 For example the line in ‘Desert Flowers’ by Keith Douglas: ‘Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying’. Complete Poems, ed. Douglas Graham (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 102. 46 For example: ‘[I] sat there on a solitary weed-grown mound in the midst of the moist early grayness, gazing at the wide Thames-valley landscape, trying to feel the full weight of the great shadow that is hanging across the world’. 13 September 1939, Journals, p. 273. 47 Personal interview with David Gascoyne, June 1999. Further evidence comes in late works such as the first line of ‘November in Devon’, a nuclearwar haunted poem from the 1980s: ‘Leaving Plymouth last seen after first smashed by bombs’. Selected Poems, p. 249. 48 Personal interview with Gascoyne, June 1999. 49 Ibid. 50 This can be usefully compared to Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, a poem of the same period concerning the residues of beliefÂ€– and the need for a salutary encounter. See, in particular: ‘I was still the same, / Knowing myself yet being someone otherÂ€– / And he a face still forming, yet the words sufficed’. Four Quartets, p. 39. Eliot’s wartime poems are discussed at length in Chapter 4. 51 See my discussion of this phenomenon in Chapter 2, especially with regards to David Jones’ ‘Wedding Poems’, written amid falling bombs, and then Rose Macaulay’s ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’. 52 Stephen Spender, ‘Some Observations on English Poetry Between Two Wars’, Transformation, 3, ed. Henry Treece and Stefan Schimanski, n.d. (c. 1945), 176. 53 See for example Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground (Cambridge: Salt, 2007), or Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern

218


British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 54 ‘William Jeffrey had used it in his work. Aldous Huxley had written about “the apocalypse of flowers”. Joseph Macleod used it in The Ecliptic, and Edwin Muir was later, in his poem “Salem”, actually to refer to the “New Apocalypse”, which was the title of our first anthology,’ Hendry quoted by James Keery in ‘Planning New Apocalypses’, PN Review, 30:5 (May/June 2004), 63–6 (63). 55 Ibid. 56 Reprinted in Scarfe’s Auden and After, p. 155. 57 MacKay, Modernism and World War II, p. 85. 58 J. F. Hendry in The New Apocalypse, ed. J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece (London: Fortune Press, 1939), pp. 49–58 (p. 55); hereafter cited parenthetÂ� ically as NA, followed by page numbers. 59 G. S. Fraser, ‘Apocalypse in Poetry’, in The White Horseman, ed. Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry (London: Routledge, 1941), pp. 3–31 (p. 3). 60 The movement and the history of its reception is charted in exhaustive detail by James Keery in his series of PN Review articles dated 2003–6 and entitled ‘The Burning Baby and the Bathwater’: 1. ‘The Punch-Drunk Apocalypse’ and 2. ‘The New Romantic School’, 29:4 (March/April 2003), 58–62; 3. ‘Dylan Thomas and the Apocalypse’ and 4. ‘The Apocalyptic Manifesto’, 29:5 (May/June 2003), 49–54; 5. ‘One Wet, Winter Evening’ and 6. ‘Apocalypse, Whole or Corner’, 29:6 (July/August 2003), 57–62; 7. ‘In Search of a Weltanschauung’ and 8. ‘The Seventh Sage’, 30:2 (November/December 2003), 26–32; 9. ‘Muddying Inclusively’, 30:4 (March/April 2004), 40–2; 10. ‘Planning New Apocalypses’, 30:5 (May/June 2004), 63–6; 11. ‘Faith, Hope and Hilarity’, 31:1 (September/October 2004), 45–49; 12. ‘The Originating Hand’, 31:6 (July/August 2005), 57–61. 61 Andrew Sinclair, War like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 66. 62 A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 365. 63 Charles Tomlinson, ‘Poetry Today’, in The Modern Age, vol. vii, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 450–70 (p. 452). 64 Hendry also published the autobiographical Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood (Glasgow: MacLellan, 1947), and completed a poetic sequence Marimarusa, but the latter was not published until 1978. 65 See Andrew Crozier, ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism’, in Society and Literature 1945–1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (Methuen: London, 1983) pp. 199–233, and ‘Andrew Crozier introduces his selection from J. F. Hendry’, in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 72–3. 66 J. F. Hendry, ‘Myth and Social Integration’, in The White Horseman, ed. J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece (London: Routledge, 1941), pp. 153–79. 67 White Horseman, p. 60.


219

68 The Bombed Happiness (London: Routledge, 1942); hereafter cited parenthetÂ� ically as BH, followed by page numbers. 69 Compare George Barker’s poetical agency, dramatised as ‘the whippoorwill wends his way through the Wyoming woods’ at the close of his long poem Calamiterror (London: Faber, 1937), p. 53. 70 The Crown and the Sickle, ed. J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece (London: King and Staples, 1943), pp. 9–19; hereafter cited parenthetically as CS, followed by page numbers. 71 The Orchestral Mountain (London: Routledge, 1943), p. 7; hereafter cited parenthetically as OM, followed by page numbers. 72 See John Wilkinson, ‘The Brain’s Tent: Lynette Roberts’ Collected Poems’, Boston Review (September/October 2006), http://bostonreview.net/ [accessed May 2009] for an overview of her recent reception. 73 Central to this has been the publication of two volumes: Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), and Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005); hereafter cited parenthetically as DLR and CP, followed by page numbers. 74 Roberts’ position as a war poet has been acknowledged in some work, notÂ� ably Anthony Conran, ‘Lynette Roberts: War Poet’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 65 (1979), 50–62; also published as pp. 188–200 in The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982). 75 McGuinness, introduction to Diaries, Letters and Recollections, p. ix. 76 Indeed, her 1944 book of stories is called Village Dialect. 77 See McGuinness’ introductory discussion of the filmic in ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, Roberts, Collected Poems, p. xxviii. 78 See accounts of their meetings and Roberts’ visit to Jones’ 1947 exhibition, Diaries, Letters, and Recollections, pp. 179, 187. 79 David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 1937), preface, p. xiv. 80 Lynette Roberts, ‘From a New Perception of Colour. And I shall take as my example the Raid on Swansea’, Life and Letters To-day, 29:44 (April 1941), 24–5. 81 Notably, section 5 is a reworking of ‘Cwmcelyn’, first published in Roberts’ Poems (1944). 82 War Pictures by British Artists, 2nd series, no. 4, Air Raids, pp. 5–6. 83 War Pictures by British Artists, 1st series, no. 2, Blitz (Oxford University Press, 1942). 84 See David Mellor, Gill Saunders and Patrick Wright, Recording Britain: A Pictorial Doomsday of Pre-war Britain (London: V&A Publications, 1992). 85 Quoted in Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 94. 86 Ibid. 87 Sutherland in postwar interview, cited ibid., p. 84. 88 ‘Only Picasso, however, seemed to have the true idea of metamorphosis, whereby things have a new form through feeling.’ Sutherland in interview

220


with Douglas Cooper in The Works of Graham Sutherland (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), p. 61. 89 For correspondence over what subjects he would choose (and why) for his war drawings, see the letters between Sutherland and E.M. O’R Dickey, secretary to the War Artists Advisory Committee, in September 1940. Imperial War Museum archive, GP/55/57/19 and GP/55/57/23. 90 Cooper, Works of Graham Sutherland, p. 99. 91 Collected as plates 1–10 Roberto Tassi, ed., Sutherland: The Wartime Drawings, trans., ed. and with a forward by Julian Andrews (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1980). 92 Letter from Sutherland to Edwin Mullins, 10 September 1971, quoted in Berthoud, Sutherland, p. 100. 93 Ibid., p. 102. 94 Sutherland essay, ‘Images Wrought from Destruction’ (1971) in Tassi, ed., Sutherland: Wartime Drawings, p. 2. 95 Tassi, ed., Sutherland: Wartime Drawings, p. 19. 96 ‘Art Critic’, ‘War Artists and the War’, Penguin New Writing, 16, 108–17 (116). 97 Tassi, ed., Sutherland: Wartime Drawings, p. 148. 98 Sutherland’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, was in the same period moving towards using actual flesh as inspiration for his triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). See, for example, David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), ‘when you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror … well of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses’, p. 46. 99 Cited in Mark Hayworth Booth, ed., The Art of Lee Miller (London, V&A Publications, 2007), p. 154. 100 Ibid., pp. 36–89. 101 Roland Penrose, The Road is Wider than Long (London: London Gallery Editions, 1939). 102 See Tim Newark, Camouflage (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), pp. 92–4 for details of Penrose’s war workÂ€– and images of Miller under various types of netting. 103 See David Williams, Naval Camouflage 1914–1945: A Complete Visual Reference (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), pp. 35–6 for details of Wadsworth; and Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), especially ‘Modernism in Camouflage’, pp. 43–9, for a generalised cultural discussion. 104 Some of the others are of shelterers in tube stations that form a counterpoint to Henry Moore’s work. More still are of workers in factories, and some of cultural figures in LondonÂ€– e.g., Humphrey Jennings. 105 See Angus Calder, The People’s War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p.Â€201.


221

106 Grim Glory: Britain under Fire (London: Lund Humphries, 1941), p. 3; hereafter cited parenthetically as GG, followed by page numbers. 107 Full list given in appendix 3. All the images discussed in this chapter are directly attributed to MillerÂ€ – she also wrote the captions. See the Grim Glory introduction, n.p. 108 Barbara Pym wrote in an unfinished wartime novel, ‘Maida Vale is so wide and noble, I always think, in spite of the decaying grandeur of some of the houses. Now with ruins from the bombings here and there, the nobility seemed accentuated, as if the ruins were those of ancient Greece or Rome.’ Quoted in Rawlinson British Writing of the Second World War, p. 82. 109 J. M. Richards, introduction to The Bombed Buildings of Britain (London: Architectural Press, 1942), p. 3. 110 Ibid. This finds a decisive riposte in Rawlinson, Literature of the Second World War: ‘The Ruskinian tones belie the fact that Richards does not relate the destruction to the builders, occupants or users of these buildings’ (p. 86). A further discussion of the aesthetics of ruins and ‘ruin-pleasure’ is in chapter 5. 111 An image of this statue also closes the Jennings film London Can Take It (1940). 112 Cited by Hayworth Booth, Art of Lee Miller, p. 152. 113 ‘Germany’ in Lee Miller’s War, ed. Anthony Penrose (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 173. 114 Ibid., p. 181. 115 Vogue [American edition] (June 1945), 104. 116 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, in Humphrey Jennings: Filmmaker, Painter, Poet, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings (London: British Film Institute, 1982) pp. 53–9 (p. 53). 117 See Kevin Jackson’s superb and exhaustive biography Humphrey Jennings (London: Picador, 2004). 118 Finally published, in an edited and truncated form, as Pandemonium: The Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (London: Andre Deutsch, 1985). 119 Jackson, Jennings, pp. 231–2. 120 Ibid., p. 232. 121 Full text in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), pp. 296–7. 122 Jackson, Jennings, p. 253. 123 Other reports from defeated Germany included Stephen Spender’s horrifically vivid travels. He also noted how psychic and social fragmentation in Germany after bombing was qualitatively different to anything Britain experienced: In England there are holes, gaps and wounds, but the surrounding life of the Â�people themselves has filled them up, creating a scar which will heal. In towns such as Cologne and those of the Ruhr, something quite different has happened. The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the surrounding

222

Notes to pages 135–140 life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city which is not only battered but also dismembered and cut off from the rest of Germany and from Europe. The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcass, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the CathedralÂ€– the commerce of destruction instead of production. The people who live there seem quite dissociated from Cologne. They resemble rather a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and who are camping there, living in the cellars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization. European Witness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), p. 22.

124 Letter from Jennings to Cicely Jennings, 30 September 1945, in Reader, pp. 103–4. 125 Typified by Nicholls in ‘Surrealism in England’. 126 Typified by Remy in his chapter ‘The Eye of the Hurricane: the War Years 1940–45’, Surrealism in Britain, pp. 209–70. 127 Herbert Read, Contemporary British Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 34. 128 Spender, Air Raids, p. 6. 129 J. G. Ballard in an interview with Benedicte Page, Bookseller, 5307, 16 November 2007, 26. 4â•…The hau n t e d c i t y 1 Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 [1943]), p. 129; hereafter cited parenthetically as MF, followed by page numbers. 2 Wells, War in the Air, p. 249. 3 For the aesthetic of art from the underground in wartime see David Ashford, ‘Children Asleep in the Underground: The Tube-Shelters of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore’, Cambridge Quarterly (winter 2007), 296–316. 4 Edward Grant (Kenneth Clark’s secretary) to Henry Moore, 14 November 1950, Kenneth Clark Papers, Tate Gallery Archive, 8812.1.3.2051/1; cited by David Mellor in ‘And, oh, the stench …’, in Chris Stephens, ed., Henry Moore (London: Tate Publications, 2009), pp. 32–9, (p. 34). 5 ‘Bombed out’, Picture Post, 9:2, 12 October 1940, 9–11 (9). 6 See Angela Weight, ‘Night for Day: the Wartime Nocturne in British Painting, 1940–45’, in Paradise Lost, ed. David Mellor (London: Lund Humphries, 1987), pp. 125–8. 7 Bill Brandt, ‘Blackout in London’, Lilliput, 5:6 (December 1939), 551–8. ‘We asked Bill Brandt to capture the spirit of the blackout in one set of pictures’ (551; my emphasis). 8 ‘London, 1940’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. and intro. Hermione Lee (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 21–5 (p. 24). 9 Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon at a Venture (London: Russell Hart Davies, 1952), pp. 11–12.


223

10 Notably the work of Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996). 11 For attempts at understanding this inheritance see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), especially ch. 3, ‘Modernist Hauntology’, pp. 103–31; or Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 12 Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 88. 13 The essay was retitled ‘At Home’ and collected in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951) and then in Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 333–6; the memoirs of the April raids in 1941 come in Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 79–88. 14 Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 74. 15 The amnesia thriller of the interwar years includes such works as Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier (1936) andÂ€ – of courseÂ€ – Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941). For a reading of Rowe’s amnesia as the recurrence of shell-shock Modernism, see Damon Marcel Decoste, ‘Modernism’s ShellShocked History: Amnesia, Repetition, and the War in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 45:4 (winter 1999), 428–51. 16 See Deer’s analysis of The Ministry of Fear in the light of spiritualism and secrecy, Culture in Camouflage, pp.151–68. 17 See Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: The Last of Britain’s Witches (London: Fourth Estate, 2001) for extensive details on the case. 18 Details cited by William Wootten in his review, ‘At the thirteenth hour’, London Review of Books, 25 September 2003, 27–8 (27). 19 David Jones, Wedding Poems, ed. Thomas Dilworth (London: Enitharmon, 2002). 20 See the perceptive critique of Jones studies by Elizabeth F. Judge: ‘Perhaps ultimately hurting their cause by their exclusivity and impetus to canonize, academics who write about Jones generally cast themselves in the role of advocate and protector, and for the few exceptions to this rule who do not accept this representative function, references to their work by the camarilla is inevitably preceded by cautionary descriptors alerting the readers to these writers’ unexpectedly critical stance.’ ‘Notes on the outside: David Jones, Unshared Backgrounds, and (The Absence of) Canonicity’, ELH, 68: 1 (spring 2001), 179–213 (182). 21 One can begin to understand the complicated breadth of Jones’ appeal by juxtaposing two of his critics: see, respectively, Drew Milne, ‘David Jones: A Charter for Philistines’, in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 2005), pp. 260–3; and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2006), which develops the Clark lectures he gave in Cambridge. 22 David Jones, The Anathemata (London: Faber, 1952), p. 14; hereafter cited parenthetically as A, followed by page numbers. 23 See various apologias, for example Thomas Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (University of Toronto, 1988).

224


24 Grisewood, unpublished conference paper, delivered in Cambridge in 1976 and cited in Elizabeth Ward, David Jones: Mythmaker (Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 46. 25 Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings by David Jones, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber, 1959), pp. 97–106 (p. 97). 26 Ibid., p.106. 27 Jones, Wedding Poems, p. 33. 28 Neil Corcoran, The Song of Deeds: A Study of ‘The Anathemata’ of David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982), p. 33. 29 J. C. F. Littlewood, ‘Joyce–Eliot–Tradition’, Scrutiny, 19:4 (October 1953), 336–40 (336). 30 Ibid., 339. 31 M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 296, 299. 32 Jones, Wedding Poems, p. 33. 33 Wootten, ‘Thirteenth hour’, 27–8. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 See Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), for intricate publication history details. 36 Louis Bonnerot, ‘David Jones and the Notion of Fragments’, Agenda 11, no. 1 (autumn/winter 1973/4), 81; cited in Corcoran, Jones, p. 29. 37 Jones, Wedding Poems, p. 40. 38 Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1949]), p. 91; hereafter cited parenthetically as HD, followed by page numbers. 39 Respectively: Piette, Imagination at War, pp. 163–72; Shafquat Towheed, ‘Territory, Space, Modernity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and Wartime London’, in Elizabeth Bowen, New Critical Perspectives, ed. Susan Osborn (Cork University Press, 2009), pp. 113–31. 40 See Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Eibhear Walshe (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). 41 R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1993]), p. 109. 42 Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 418–24. 43 Ibid., pp. 199–210 (p. 210). 4 4 ‘Preface’ to The Second Ghost Book, ed. Elizabeth Asquith (1952); collected in Elizabeth Bowen, Afterthoughts: Pieces about Writing (London: Longman, 1962), pp. 101–4 (p. 101). 45 Bowen, Collected Stories, pp. 362–70 (p. 362). 46 Ibid., pp. 170–9 (p. 178). 47 Bowen, ‘Postscript’, Mulberry Tree, pp. 96–9 (p. 95). 48 As listed in Neil Corcoran’s Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 147–67. 49 Bowen, ‘Postscript’, Mulberry Tree, p. 98.


225

50 Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (London: Vintage, 1998 [1938]), p. 270. 51 Elizabeth Bowen, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), p. 7; hereafter cited parenthetically as DL, followed by page numbers. 52 Bowen, ‘Postscript’, Mulberry Tree, p. 97. 53 See Wasson, Urban Gothic, pp. 59–74 for a detailed reading of Kavan’s London terrors in a specifically Gothic tradition. 54 Collected in I am Lazarus (London: Cape, 1945), pp. 39–50. 55 Ibid., p. 39. 56 Ibid., p. 49. 57 Ibid., pp. 123–46 (p. 124). 58 Ibid., p. 137. 59 Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (London: Faber, 1945), p. 12. 60 First published in the Dublin Review of May 1940; collected in The Image of the City and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 92–102. 61 G. W. Stonier, The Memoirs of a Ghost (London: Grey Walls Press, 1947), p. 55. 62 D. Low, ‘London buries her past’, Listener, 13 February 1941, 227–8. 5 â•…The n ew L on d on j u ngle 1 G.W. Stonier, Round London with the Unicorn (London: Turnstile Press, 1951), p. 51. 2 See, for example, R. S. R. Fitter, ‘The Effects of the War on Bird Life’, Nature, 148 (1941), 59. 3 Woodward, In Ruins, pp. 2–3. 4 Whose potency is so often signified with its capitalisation in nineteenthcentury texts. 5 See, for example, Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), with its convincing claims that ‘the imperial plot moves from empire to metropolis and back to empire’, p. 102. 6 Dated as ‘circa 1875’ and published as an appendix to the World’s Classics edition of Richard Jefferies, After London, ed. and intro. John Fowles (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 244. 7 Ibid., p. 248. 8 Ibid., intro, p. vii. 9 Ibid., p. 36. 10 Ibid., p. 202. 11 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: Everyman, 1993 [1898]), p. 153. 12 Edward Thomas, The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1993 [1909]), p. 5. 13 Ibid., pp. 75–6. Part of this quotation was also used as an epigraph for Will Self’s The Book of Dave (London: Viking, 2006)Â€– another story of a postLondon civilisation making belief systems out of traces and fragments.

226


14 Edward Thomas, Collected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p.73. 15 ‘Trinity Sunday’, reprinted by Constance Babington-Smith in Rose Macaulay: A Life (London: Collins, 1972) pp. 68–9. 16 Ibid., p. 77. 17 Macaulay has been well served by three biographers, each of a different era. After Babington-Smith’s volume in 1972 there followed Jane Emery’s Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (London: John Murray, 1991) and Sarah LeFanu’s Rose Macaulay (London: Virago, 2003). 18 LeFanu, Rose Macaulay, p. 3. 19 The book is attended to at length in chapter 3 of Debra Rae Cohen’s Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2002), pp. 30–47. 20 ‘As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses / A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets / Quiver with startled terrorsÂ€– / How swift runs fear …’ Cited Patterson, Guernica and Total War, p. 86. 21 Aside from the biographies there are a few exceptions: Alice Bensen, Rose Macaulay (New York: Twayne, 1969); Alice Crawford, Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay (London: Associated University Presses, 1995); Stan Smith, ‘“The answer would appear to be a lemon”: Rose Macaulay’s Civil War’, English, 54:208 (2005), 15–34. 22 Indeed in 1958 a court case was brought against Penguin Books by the former managing director of a company whose reputation for sharp practice was mentioned in passing in a Macaulay description. The company was unnamed in The World my Wilderness, but the plaintiff claimed he could have been identified, so good was her description of the blitzed streets. See LeFanu, Rose Macaulay, p. 354. 23 See Sanders, ed., The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945. 24 This is the major thesis of Jeanette N. Passty, Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay (London: Associated University Presses, 1988). 25 See, respectively, Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 6, ‘Wandering the London Wasteland’, pp. 189–213; and Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, chapter 5, pp. 92–114. 26 Rose Macaulay, The World my Wilderness (London: Virago, 1983 [1950]), p. 52; hereafter cited parenthetically as WW, followed by page numbers. 27 Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, p. 96. 28 Emery, Writer’s Life, p. 285. 29 Ibid. 30 R. S. R. Fitter, The Natural History of London (London: William Collins, 1945), pp. 228–39. 31 Ibid., p. 228. 32 The Times, 3 May 1945, 2. This quote had still enough cultural potency to also be used as the opening for Bryan Appleyard’s The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-war Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 3.


227

33 The spelling varies between willow-herb and willowherb. I use willowherb but have kept the original form in quotations from texts. 34 Fitter, Natural History of London, p. 231. 35 Fireweed (London: Puffin, 1969), Jill Paton Walsh’s novel of the Blitz, took the name of the plant as sufficient shorthand for the survival of individuals. 36 See also Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Churchill’s Funeral IV’, where he memorialises the churches lost in the BlitzÂ€– ‘St Mary Abchurch, St Mary Alderbury, St Mary-le-Bow’Â€– through glimpses of ‘the ragwort / and the willow-herbÂ€/ as edifiers / of ruined things’. Caanan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 48. 37 Ackroyd, London: The Biography, p. 746. 38 Ibid. 39 Fitter, Natural History of London, p. 228. 40 The complicated wartime play between plant names, human agency and actual spaces is perhaps best illustrated in this period by Jocelyn Brooke’s novel The Military Orchid (1948). See Mark Rawlinson, ‘Wild Soldiers: Jocelyn Brooke and England’s Militarized Landscape’, in Mengham and Reeve, ed., Fiction of the 1940s, pp. 101–23. 41 Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, rev. and expanded edn, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 136. 42 See, for example, History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings, 1940–41 (London: Batsford, 1941), with photographs by Cecil Beaton and commentary by James Pope-Hennessy, pp. 3–15. 43 Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, p. 534. 4 4 C. Day-Lewis, The Otterbury Incident (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 [1948]), p. 17. 45 Calder, People’s War, p. 146. 46 Tom Wintringham, Picture Post, 15 June 1940, 9. These columns were swiftly collected into his New Ways of War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940). 47 Vividly illustrated by one of Wintringham’s instructors, Yank Levy, in his handbook for putative British partisans: Guerrilla Warfare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940), p. 70. 48 Tom Wintringham, Picture Post, 21 September 1940, p. 9. 49 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, script, prod. and dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943. 50 Another moment of the bombsites offering a space for postwar resistance to bourgeois norms comes in this midnight walk through the rubble to find a diving-off point for a swim in the Thames, traversing across ‘a moonswept open space [that] used to be Fyefoot Lane, where many a melancholic noticeboard tells in the ruins of the City where churches and where public houses stood … we turned out of the moonlight into a dark labyrinth of alleys and gutted warehouses where indistinguishable objects loomed in piles’. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1954]), p. 105. 51 H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Trilogy: The Walls do not Fall, Tribute to Angels, The Flowering of the Rod (Manchester: Carcanet, 1973 [1945]), p. 3.

228


52 Ackroyd, London: The Biography, p. 745. 53 Conversely, when Barbary is covered in ‘the dirt of ruined London’, p. 60, her father assumes it is because she has been drawing with charcoal. 54 LeFanu, Writer’s Life, p. 232. 55 Hewison, Under Siege, p. 36. 56 Robert Henrey, A Village in Piccadilly (London: J. M. Dent, 1943), p. 74. 57 Letter to Daniel George, May 1941, quoted by Emery, Rose Macaulay, p. 267. 58 See Chapter 2 above and also Piette, Imagination at War, ‘Fire’, pp. 39–81. 59 Bowen, Heat of the Day, p. 151. 60 Rose Macaulay, ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ (1942), collected in London Calling, ed. Storm Jameson (New York: Harper Brothers, 1943), pp. 299–308 (p. 299). 61 Ibid. 62 Details may be preserved in letters in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, ‘Letters between Dame Rose Macaulay and Father J. H. C. Johnson’Â€– but the box is sealed until June 2012. 63 Macaulay, ‘Miss Anstruther’, p. 299. 64 Ibid., pp. 306–7. 65 Ibid., p. 307. 66 Ibid., p. 308. 67 Letter to Victor Gollancz, quoted in Emery, Rose Macaulay, p. 268. 68 Macaulay, ‘Books DestroyedÂ€– and Indispensable’, Listener, 14 July 1949, 63. 69 Andrew Marvell, Selected Poems, ed. James Winn (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), p. 63. 70 Quoted by Emery, Rose Macaulay, p. 287. 71 Letter from Macaulay to John Hayward in 1944, quoted in Constance Babington-Smith, Macaulay, p. 126. 72 William Shakespeare, Othello iv.3, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, 1988). 73 See this fuller definition: ‘It was used of all defects which the Greeks thought foreign to themselves and natural to all other nations … but … after the Persian war the word took the contemptuous sense of outlandish, brutal, rude’. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), p. 275. 74 Rose Macaulay, ‘Notes on the way’, Tide and Time, 5 October 1940, 981–2. 75 Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, p. iv. 76 Ibid., p. xvi. 77 Ibid., p. xvii. 78 Ibid. 79 As noted by Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, p. 97. 80 Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, p. 211. 81 Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2004), p. 304. 82 Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, p. 453.


229

83 Ibid., p. 453. 84 Roloff Beny Interprets in Photographs ‘The Pleasure of Ruins’ by Rose Macaulay (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 85 John Wyndham, ‘Meteor’, in The Seeds of Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1956]), pp. 49–66 (p. 49). 86 John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1951]), p. 197. 87 Ibid., p. 213. 88 This oversimplified critique of Wyndham originated from Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 292. 89 Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (London: Collins, 1973), p. 157. 90 J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: HarperCollins, 2008 [1962]), p. 9. 91 Ibid., p. 19. 92 Ibid., p. 122. 93 Ibid., p. 44. 94 See, for example, reports on the ‘urban explorer forum’ www.28dayslater. co.uk/ [accessed May 2009]. 95 Ibid. 96 Alan Weisman, The World without us (London: Virgin, 2008), p. 36. 97 Richard Leakey and Roger Levin, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Doubleday, 1995). 98 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and the Environment in the US and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 31. 99 See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 280–308; for subsequent debates about the apocalyptic sublime, see especially John Bellamy Foster, ‘The Scale of our Ecological Crisis’, Monthly Review [New York] (April 1998), 498–9. 100 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (1986), trans. and revised David Rothenberg (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 29. C oda 1 Sarah Waters, ‘Romance among the ruins’, Guardian, 28 January 2006, [books section], 4. 2 Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006), p. 224. 3 See John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), especially ch. 4, ‘Panic Grass and Feverfew’. 4 See Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), pp. 37–8.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2000). Aldiss, Brian, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (London: Doubleday, 1973). Anderson, Lindsay, ‘Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, in Humphrey Jennings: Filmmaker, Painter, Poet, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings (London: British Film Institute, 1982) pp. 53–9. Anon., ‘Bombed out’, Picture Post, 9:2, 12 October 1940, 9–11. â•… Arson: an ardent review. Part one of a Surrealist manifestation (March 1942). Appleyard, Bryan, The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-war Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). ‘Art Critic’, ‘War Artists and the War’, Penguin New Writing, 16 (March 1943), 108–17. Ashford, David, ‘Children Asleep in the Underground: The Tube-Shelters of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore’, Cambridge Quarterly (winter 2007), 296–316. Auden, W. H., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). Babington-Smith, Constance, Rose Macaulay: A Life (London: Collins, 1972). Bachelard, Gaston, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan Ross (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987 [1938]). Ballard, J. G., The Drowned World (London: Harper Collins, 2008 [1962]). â•… interview with Benedicte Page, Bookseller, 5307, 16 November 2007, 26–6. Barker, George, Calamiterror (London: Faber, 1937). â•… ‘The Chameleon Poet’, New Republic, 110, 27 October 1941, 548. â•… ‘Elegy on Tinned Meat’, Seven, 1 (summer 1938), 27–8. â•… ‘Funeral Eulogy to Lorca’, Life and Letters, 23 (October 1939), 61–5. â•… Lament and Triumph (London: Faber, 1940). â•… ‘A Note on the Dialectics of Poetry’, Purpose, 10 (January/March 1938), 27–30. â•… [questionnaire response], New Verse, 11 (October 1934), 22. â•… ‘Rilke’, New Statesman and Nation, 18, 19 August 1939, 276. â•… ‘X stanzas’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 4–5 (August 1936), 92–4. Black, Ladbroke, The Poison War (London: Stanley Paul, 1933). 230

Bibliography

231

Beer, Gillian, ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The case of Virginia Woolf’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 265–90. Bensen, Alice, Rose Macaulay (New York: Twayne, 1969). Roloff Beny Interprets in Photographs ‘The Pleasure of Ruins’ by Rose Macaulay, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). Berthoud, Roger, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Biddle, Tami Davis, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton University Press, 2002). Bluemel, Kristin, ed., Intermodernism: Writing and Culture in Interwar and Wartime Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Blythe, Ronald, ed., Components of the Scene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Boddy, Kasia, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008). The Bombed Buildings of Britain (London: Architectural Press, 1942). Bowen, Elizabeth, Afterthoughts: Pieces about Writing (London: Longman, 1962). â•… Collected Stories (London: Vintage, 1999). â•… The Death of the Heart (London: Vintage, 1998 [1938]). â•… The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945). â•… The Heat of the Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1949]). â•… The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. and intro. Hermione Lee (London: Virago, 1986). â•… People Places Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Brandt, Bill, ‘Blackout in London’, Lilliput, 5:6 (December 1939), 551–8. Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). â•… Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and the Environment in the US and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Caesar, Adrian, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s (Manchester University Press, 1991). Calder, Angus, The People’s War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). Carpenter, Humphrey, W. H. Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). Ceadel, Martin, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War’, in Class Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 161–84. Chambers, Colin, The Story of the Unity Theatre (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989). Christie, Ian, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London: Waterstone, 1985). Clarke, I. F., Voices Prophesying War, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1992). Cohen, Debra Rae, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2002).

232

Bibliography

Coffey, Laura, ‘Memory and the Trace of History in Hamilton’s Hangover Square’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 247–58. Cooper, Douglas, The Works of Graham Sutherland (London: Lund Humphries, 1961). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London: Hesperus, 2002 [1902]). Conran, Anthony, ‘Lynette Roberts: War Poet’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 65 (1979), 50–62. Corcoran, Neil, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford University Press, 2004). â•… The Song of Deeds: A Study of ‘The Anathemata’ of David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982). Corum, James S., ‘The Spanish Civil War: Lessons Learned and not Learned by the Great Powers’, Journal of Military History, 62 (1998), 313–34. Crawford, Alice, Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay (London: Associated University Presses, 1995). Crozier, Andrew, ‘Andrew Crozier introduces his selection from J. F. Hendry’, in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 72–3. â•… ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism’, in Society and Literature 1945–1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (Methuen: London, 1983), pp. 199–233. Cunningham, Valentine, Writers of the Thirties (Oxford University Press, 1988). Cunningham, Valentine, ed., The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Davies, A. T., Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body (London: J. M. Dent, 1964). Day-Lewis, Cecil, The Otterbury Incident (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 [1948]). â•… ‘Where are the War Poets?’, Penguin New Writing, 3 (February 1941), 114. Davenport-Hines, Richard, Auden (London: Vintage, 1995). Decoste, Damon Marcel, ‘Modernism’s Shell-Shocked History: Amnesia, Repetition, and the War in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear’, TwentiethCentury Literature, 45:4 (winter 1999), 428–51. Deer, Patrick, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009). Deighton, Len, Blood, Tears and Folly (London: Harper Collins, 1993). Desmond, Shaw, Chaos (London: Hutchinson, 1938). â•… Ragnarok (London: Duckworth, 1926). Dilworth, Thomas, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (University of Toronto Press, 1988). Douglas, Keith, Complete Poems, ed. Douglas Graham (Oxford University Press, 1979). Duncan, Andrew, Origins of the Underground (Cambridge: Salt, 2007). Edgerton, David, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (London: Palgrave, 1991). Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). â•… Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1995 [1944]).

Bibliography

233

Ellmann, Maud, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Emery, Jane, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (London: John Murray, 1991). Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton University Press, 2004). Felmingham, Michael, Ruins: A Personal Anthology (Feltham: Country Life Books, 1972). Fitter, R. S. R., ‘The Effects of the War on Bird Life’, Nature, 148 (1941), 59. â•… The Natural History of London (London: William Collins, 1945). Fraser, Robert, The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker (London: Random House, 2001). Fodaski, Martha, George Barker (New York: Twayne, 1969). Foster, John Bellamy, ‘The Scale of our Ecological Crisis’, Monthly Review [New York] (April 1998), 498–9. Foster, Roy, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Fuller, J. F. C., The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson, 1923). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1985). â•… Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 1989). Gascoyne, David, Collected Journals, 1936–42 (London: Skoob Books, 1991). â•… introduction to Poets of Tomorrow, Third Selection (London: Hogarth Press, 1942). â•… Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994). â•… Selected Prose 1934–1996, ed. Roger Smith (London: Enitharmon, 1998). â•… A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Enitharmon, 2000 [1935]). Gaskill, Malcolm, Hellish Nell: The Last of Britain’s Witches (London: Fourth Estate, 2001). Gerda Taro, ed. Irme Schaber, Richard Whelen and Kriten Kubben (New York: GööICP/Steidl, 2007). Ginsberg, Robert, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2004). Goodby, John and Wigginton, Chris, eds, Dylan Thomas (New Casebook) (London: Palgrave, 2001). Green, Henry, Caught (London: Harvill, 2001 [1943]). â•… Pack my Bag: A Self-Portrait (London: Vintage, 2000 [1940]). â•… Party Going (London: Harvill, 1996 [1939]). â•… Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. Matthew Yorke (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992). Greene, Graham, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage, 2004 [1938]). â•… Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). â•… The Ministry of Fear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 [1943]). â•… The Third Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1950]). â•… Ways of Escape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

234

Bibliography

Grim Glory: Britain under Fire (London: Lund Humphries, 1941). Groves, P. R. C., ‘Our future in the air’, The Times, 21 March 1922, 13–14. Haldane, J. B. S., A.R.P. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938). Hamilton, Patrick, Hangover Square (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1941]). â•… Impromptu in Moribundia, ed. Peter Widdowson (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1999 [1939]). Hanson, Neil, The First Blitz: The Secret Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). Harding, Jason, ‘Experiment in Cambridge: “A Manifesto of Young England”’, Cambridge Quarterly, 27:4 (December 1998), 287–309. Harrison, Tom, Living through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976). Hart, Liddell C. B. H., Paris; or, The Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). Hauser, Kitty, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927–1951 (Oxford University Press, 2007). Hayworth Booth, Mark, ed., The Art of Lee Miller (London: V&A Publications, 2007). Hell, Julia and Schönle, Andreas, eds, Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Hemingway, Ernest, By-line Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (London: Scribner, 1967). Hendry, J. F., The Bombed Happiness (London: Routledge, 1942). â•… The Orchestral Mountain (London: Routledge, 1943). Hendry, J. F., ed., with Henry Treece, The Crown and the Sickle (London: King and Staples, 1943). â•… The New Apocalypse (London: Fortune Press, 1939). â•… The White Horseman (London: Routledge, 1941). Henrey, Robert, A Village in Piccadilly (London: J. M. Dent, 1943). Hewison, Robert, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Trilogy: The Walls do not Fall, Tribute to Angels, The Flowering of the Rod (Manchester: Carcanet, 1973 [1945]). Hersey, John, Hiroshima (New York: Ayred A. Knopf, 1946). Hill, Geoffrey, Caanan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Hillary, Richard, The Last Enemy (London: Pan, 1956 [1943]). History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings, 1940–41 (London: Batsford, 1941) [photographs Cecil Beaton, commentary James Pope-Hennessy]. Hobsbawn, Eric, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–91 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). Holden, Inez, It was Different at the Time (London: John Lane, 1943). Ingham, H. S., ed., Fire and Water: An Anthology by Members of the NFS (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1942). Jackson, Kevin, Humphrey Jennings (London: Picador, 2004). Jefferies, Richard, After London, ed. and intro. John Fowles (Oxford University Press, 1980 [1885]).

Bibliography

235

Jennings, Humphrey, dir., A Defeated People (1945). â•… Fires were Started (1943). â•… Listen to Britain (1942). â•… London Can Take It (1940). Jennings, Humphrey, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993). â•… Pandemonium: The coming of the machine as seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (London: Andre Deutsch, 1985). Johnson, David, The City Ablaze (London: William Kimber, 1980). Jones, David, The Anathemata (London: Faber, 1952). â•… Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings by David Jones, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber, 1959). â•… In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 1937). â•… Wedding Poems, ed. Thomas Dilworth (London: Enitharmon, 2002). Jones, Nigel, Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton (London: Scribners, 1991). Judge, Elizabeth, ‘David Jones, Unshared Backgrounds, and (The Absence of) Canonicity’, ELH, 68:1 (spring 2001), 179–213. Kavan, Anna, I am Lazarus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945). Keery, James, 1. ‘The Punch-Drunk Apocalypse’; 2. ‘The New Romantic School’, PN Review, 29:4 (March/April 2003), 58–62. â•… 3. ‘Dylan Thomas and the Apocalypse’; 4. ‘The Apocalyptic Manifesto’, PN Review, 29:5 (May/June 2003), 49–54. â•… 5. ‘One Wet, Winter Evening’; 6. ‘Apocalypse, Whole or Corner’, PN Review 29:6 (July/August 2003), 57–62. â•… 7. ‘In Search of a Weltanschauung’; 8. ‘The Seventh Sage’, PN Review, 30:2 (November/December 2003), 26–32. â•… 9. ‘Muddying Inclusively’, PN Review, 30:4 (March/April 2004), 40–2. â•… 10. ‘Planning New Apocalypses’, PN Review, 30:5 (May/June 2004), 63–6. â•… 11. ‘Faith, Hope and Hilarity’, PN Review, 31:1 (September/October 2004), 45–9. â•… 12. ‘The Originating Hand’, PN Review, 31:6 (July/August 2005), 57–61. Knowles, Sebastian, A Purgatorial Flame (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). Langdon-Davies, John, Air Raid: The Technique of Silent Approach, High Explosive Panic (London: Routledge, 1938). Leakey, Richard and Levin, Roger, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Doubleday, 1995). LeFanu, Sarah, Rose Macaulay (London: Virago, 2003). Levy, Yank, Guerrilla Warfare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940). Le Queux, William, The Terror of the Air (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1920). Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R., A Greek English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). Lindqvist, Sven, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta, 2001).

236

Bibliography

Littlewood, J. C. F., ‘Joyce–Eliot–Tradition’, Scrutiny, 19:4 (October 1953), 336–40. The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945, ed. Anne Sanders, intro. Robin Woden (London: London Topographical Society, 2005). Low, D., ‘London buries her past’, Listener, 13 February 1941, 227–8. Mabey, Richard, The Unofficial Countryside (London: Collins, 1973). Macaulay, Rose, ‘Books destroyedÂ€ – and indispensable’, Listener, 14 July 1949, 63. â•… ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, in London Calling, ed. Storm Jameson (New York: Harper Bros, 1943), pp. 299–308. â•… ‘Notes on the way’, Tide and Time, 5 October 1940, 981–2. â•… The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953). â•… The World my Wilderness (London: Virago, 1983 [1950]). McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford University Press, 1991). Maclaren-Ross, Julian, Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross, 1965). McLaughlin, Joseph, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). MacNeice, Louis, Autumn Journal (London: Faber and Faber, 1998 [1939]). â•… Collected Poems, ed. Peter Macdonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2007). â•… ‘The morning after the blitz’, Picture Post, 3 May 1941, 9–15. â•… Selected Prose, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). â•… Springboard, Poems 1941–1944 (London: Faber, 1944). â•… The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber, 1965). â•… ‘The Way we Live Now’, Penguin New Writing, 5 (April 1941), 9–14. McCarthy, Cormac, The Road (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006). MacKay, Marina, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2007). MacKay, Marina, and Stonebridge, Lyndsey, eds, British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-century (London: Palgrave, 2007). McLoughlin, Kate, ‘Adynaton: A War Topos’, Peer English, 1 (spring 2006), 15–24. Madge, Charles, Harrison, Tom and Jennings, Humphrey, ‘Anthropology at home’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, 12. Marvell, Andrew, Selected Poems, ed. James Winn (London: J. M. Dent, 1962). Maxwell, Gavin, Harpoon at a Venture (London: Russell Hart Davies, 1952). Mellor, David, Saunders, Gill and Wright, Patrick, Recording Britain: A Pictorial Doomsday of Pre-war Britain (London: V&A Publications, 1992). Meloy, Ellen, The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). Mengham, Rod, ‘Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge’, New Formations, 44 (autumn 2001), 26–33. â•… ‘Broken Glass’, in The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, ed. Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp.124–33. â•… The Idiom of the Time: The Writing of Henry Green (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Bibliography

237

Miller, Lee, ‘“Believe It”/ Lee Miller Cables from Germany’, Vogue [American edition] (June 1945), 104. Miller, Tyrus, ‘Documentary / Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity in the 1930s’, Modernism/modernity, 9:2 (2002), 225–41. â•… Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Milne, Drew, ‘David Jones: A Charter for Philistines’, in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 2005), pp. 260–3. Murdoch, Iris, Under the Net (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1954]). Naess, Arne, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy [1986], trans. and rev. David Rothenberg (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Newark, Tim, Camouflage (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007). Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995). â•… ‘Surrealism in England’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 396–416. Noel-Tod, Jeremy, ‘The Wanderings of Bloom and Bone: Ulysses, Hangover Square and the Art of Gratuity’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 236–46. North, Michael, Henry Green and the Writing of his Generation (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984). O’Neill, Joseph, Day of Wrath (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). Orwell, George, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. i, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). â•… The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. ii, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). â•… Coming up for Air (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1939]). â•… The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1937]). Osborn, Susan, ed., Elizabeth Bowen, New Critical Perspectives (Cork University Press, 2009). Panter-Downes, Mollie, London War Notes, ed. William Shawn (London: Longman, 1972). Paris, Michael, Winged warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859–1917 (Manchester University Press, 1992). Parsons, Deborah, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2000). Passty, Jeanette N., Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay (London: Associated University Presses, 1988). Patterson, Ian, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile, 2007). Peake, Mervyn, Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake, ed. Maeve Gilmore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Penrose, Anthony, ed., Lee Miller’s War (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). Penrose, Roland, The Road is Wider than Long (London: London Gallery Editions, 1939). Piette, Adam, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995).

238

Bibliography

Pollard, Leslie, Menace: A Novel of the Near Future (London: T. Erner Laurie, 1935). The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, script, prod. and dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1943). Pound, Ezra, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1928). Preston, Paul, We saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (London: Constable, 2008). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996). Rae, Patricia, ‘Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 49:2 (summer 2003), 246–75. Rainey, Lawrence, Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Rankin, Nicholas, Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). Rattenbury, Arnold, ‘Total Attainder and the Helots’, in The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. John Lucas (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1978), pp. 103–19. Rawlinson, Mark, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2000). â•… ‘Wild Soldiers: Jocelyn Brooke and England’s Militarized Landscape’, in The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, ed. Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 101–23. Ray, Paul C., The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Read, Herbert, ed. Contemporary British Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951). â•… Surrealism (London: Faber, 1936). Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain (London: Ashgate, 1999). Roberts, Lynette, Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005). â•… Diaries, Letters and Recollections, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008). â•… ‘From a New Perception of Colour. And I shall take as my Example the Raid on Swansea’, Life and Letters To-day, 29:44 (April 1941), 24–5. Rosenthal, M. L. and Gall, Sally M., The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1983). Roughton, Roger, ‘Editorial’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 4–5 (August/ September 1936), 74–5. Salton-Cox, Glyn, ‘Hamilton and the Banality of Evil’, Critical Engagements, 1:1 (2007), 309–31. Sandburg, Carl, Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, rev. and expanded edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). Sansom, William, The Birth of a Story (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972). â•… The Blitz: Westminster at War (Oxford University Press, 1990 [1947]). â•… The Body (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).

Bibliography

239

â•… Fireman Flower and Other Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1944). â•… ‘From the Water Junction’, in Schimanski and Treece, eds, A Map of Hearts, pp. 129–41. â•… ‘In the Morning’, Penguin New Writing, 20 (1944), 31–42. â•… ‘The Naked Flame’, in Fire and Water: An Anthology by Members of the NFS, ed. H. S. Ingham (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1942), pp. 210–19. â•… ‘Notes on Contributors’, in A Map of Hearts: A Collection of Short Stories ed. Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1944), p. 4. â•… Something Terrible, Something Lovely (London: Hogarth Press, 1948). â•… Three (London: Hogarth Press, 1946). Scarfe, Francis, Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry (London: Routledge, 1942). Self, Will, The Book of Dave (London: Viking, 2006). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, 1988). Sinclair, Andrew, War like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989). Skelton, Robin, ed., Poetry of the Forties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Smith, R. D., ‘Radio Scripts 1941–1963’, in Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, ed. Terrence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), pp. 141–8. Smith, Stan, ‘“The answer would appear to be a lemon”: Rose Macaulay’s Civil War’, English 54:208 (2005), 15–34. Spender, Stephen, Citizens in War and After (London: George Harrap, 1945). â•… The Destructive Elements (London: Hogarth Press, 1935). â•… Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975). â•… European Witness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946). â•… ‘Introduction’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, ed., trans. and comm. J. B. Leishmann and Stephen Spender (London: Hogarth Press, 1939). â•… ‘Some Observations on English Poetry Between Two Wars’, Transformation, 3, ed. Henry Treece and Stefan Schimanski, n.d. [c. 1945], 176. â•… World within World (London: Faber, 1997 [1951]). Spender, Stephen, ed., Poems for Spain (London: Hogarth Press, 1939). Spufford, Francis, I may be some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Steer, George, ‘The tragedy of Guernica’, The Times, 28 April 1937, 17. Stephens, Chris, ed., Henry Moore (London: Tate Publications, 2009). Stonebridge, Lyndsey, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in mid-Century British Culture (London: Palgrave, 2007). Stonier, G. W., The Memoirs of a Ghost (London: Grey Walls Press, 1947). â•… Round London with the Unicorn (London: Turnstile Press, 1951). â•… ‘Three poets’, New Statesman, 13, 29 May 1937, 896. Strandling, Robert, Your Children will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008).

240

Bibliography

Sword, Helen, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Sylvester, David, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). Tandon, Bharat, ‘Henry Green’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, ed. Adrian Poole (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 393–406. Tassi, Roberto, ed., Sutherland: The Wartime Drawings, trans., ed. and fwd Julian Andrews (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1980). Thomas, Dylan, ‘The Burning Baby’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 1 (May 1936), 10–14. â•… The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Paladin, 1987). â•… Collected Poems 1934–1953, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: J. M. Dent, 1998). â•… Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies (London: J. M. Dent, 1984). â•… Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, ed. John Ackerman (London: J. M. Dent, 1995). Thomas, Edward, Collected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). â•… The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1993 [1909]). Tolley, A. T., British Literary Periodicals of World War II and After (Kemptville ON: Golden Dog Press, 2007). â•… The Poetry of the Thirties (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975). Tomlinson, Charles, ‘Poetry Today’, in The Modern Age, vol. vii, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 450–70. Treglown, Jeremy, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). Tuma, Keith, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Tuma, Keith, ed., Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2002). Walsh, Jill Paton, Fireweed (London: Puffin, 1969). Walshe, Eibhear, ed., Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). War Pictures by British Artists, 2nd series, no. 4, Air Raids (Oxford University Press, 1943). War Pictures by British Artists, 1st series, no. 2, Blitz (Oxford University Press, 1942). Ward, Elizabeth, David Jones: Mythmaker (Manchester University Press, 1983). Ward, Geoff, ‘The Wibberlee Wobberlee Walk’, in Fictions of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, ed. Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 26–45. Wasson, Sara, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Waters, Sarah, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006). â•… ‘Romance among the ruins’, Guardian, 28 January 2006, [books section], 4.

Bibliography

241

Waugh, Evelyn, Put out more Flags (London: Chapman and Hall, 1942). Webber, Andrew, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Weight, Angela, ‘Night for Day: The Wartime Nocturne in British Painting, 1940–45’, in Paradise Lost, ed. David Mellor (London: Lund Humphries, 1987). Weisman, Alan, The World without us (London: Virgin, 2008). Wells, H. G., The War in the Air, rev. edn including a new preface (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941 [1908]). â•… The War of the Worlds (London: Everyman, 1993 [1898]). Wilkinson, John, ‘The Brain’s Tent: Lynette Roberts’ Collected Poems’, Boston Review (September/October 2006), http://bostonreview.net/ [accessed May 2009]. Williams, Charles, All Hallows’ Eve (London: Faber, 1945). â•… The Image of the City and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1958). Williams, David, Naval Camouflage 1914–1945: A Complete Visual Reference (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001). Williams, Rowan, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2006). Williams-Ellis, Clough, England and the Octopus (Portmeirion: Golden Dragon, 1975 [1928]). Wintringham, Tom, ‘Arm the citizens!’, Picture Post, 21 September, 1940, 9. â•… New Ways of War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940). Woodward, Christopher, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 1999). Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 [1941]). â•… Collected Essays, vol. i, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). â•… Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford University Press, 1992 [1925]). â•… Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). â•… A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1953). Wootten, William, ‘At the thirteenth hour’, London Review of Books, 25 September 2003, 27–8. Wright, Patrick, ‘Dropping their eggs’, London Review of Books, 21 August 2001, 11–14. â•… The Village that Died for England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Wyndham, John, The Day of the Triffids (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1951]). â•… The Seeds of Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1956]).

Index

aerial perspectives and birds of prey, 37, 90 and narration, 34 and threat, 32–3 and visual art, 32 archaeology and the aerial perspective, 33 made possible by bombs, 188, 195 as mode of poetic composition, 156 atomic test sites, 204 Auden, W. H., 9, 26 Ballard, J. G. The Drowned World, 200 use of surrealism, 137 Barker, George, 74, 90, 91 Calamiterror, 29, 91 Elegy on Spain, 26–30, 75 Battle of the Clouds (film), 12 Black, Ladbroke The Poison War, 21 blackout, 97, 140 bombing and anti-Semitism, 18 early history of, 11–12 and fears of civil unrest, 37 and the First World War, 14, 15 and halted time, 6 with incendiaries. SeeÂ€Fire and interwar science fiction, 16–22 known as air policing, 12 post Second World War, 204 use in postwar fiction, 203 and psychological casualties, 17, 43, 44 and the Spanish Civil War, 22–30 Bowen, Elizabeth, 9 The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 159 The Heat of the Day, 157–8, 189 ‘In the Square’, 161 ‘Introduction to William Sansom’s stories’, 57

‘London 1940’, 140 ‘Mysterious Kôr’, 9 ‘Postscript to The Demon Lover’, 160, 162 and pre-war ghost stories, 158, 159 Brandt, Bill, 140 Breton, André, 87 Broken glass, 60, 63, 118, 126 Buchan, John, 14 Buell, Lawrence, 202 Caesar, Adrian, 27 camouflage, 123 Ceadel, Martin, 17 Chernobyl, 200 Christopher, John The Death of Grass, 198 churches in London St Clement Danes, 145 St Giles Cripplegate, 185 St James Piccadilly, 126 Clark, Kenneth disparages potato digging, 116 interpretation of war artists and ghosts, 139 Craigie, Jill Out of Chaos, 139 Crichton, Charles Hue and Cry, 183 Dachau, 130 Darmstadt, 9 Davies, A. T., 82 Day-Lewis, Cecil The Otterbury Incident, 183 ‘Where are the war poets?’, 76 Desmond, Shaw Ragnarok, 19 Doré, Gustave ‘The New Zealander’, 167 Duncan, Helen witchcraft trial, 146

242

Index Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets, 76 ‘Little Gidding’, 75–8, 79, 80, 82 The Waste Land, 192, 193, 195 Esty, Jed, 4 Experiment, 86 fire ash, 79, 80 and book-burning, 189 and burnt letters, 188–90 charcoal, 188 use in elegies, 76–81 Great Fire of London (1666), 182, 192 and literary representation, 47–8, 71 and time perception, 51, 52 and willed destruction, 59–62, 64 First World War, 98, 150 Fitter, R. S. R. The Natural History of London, 179 flowers, 20, 179, 180, 182, 203 SeeÂ€Rosebay willowherb French resistance as a model for bombsite life, 174 Fuller, J. F. C. The Reformulation of War, 17 gas attacks, 21, 22 Gascoyne, David, 8, 88, 89, 93 ‘The Bomb-site Anchorite’, 99–101 ‘Fragments Towards a Religio Poetae’, 99 ‘The Gravel Pit Field’, 97 ‘Introduction to Poets of Tomorrow’, 94 Journals, 96 Night Thoughts, 96 ‘Noctambules’, 97 A Short Survey of Surrealism, 87 ‘Zero’, 96 ghosts, 138, 140 and Elizabeth Bowen, 157–62, 164–5 manipulation of, 146 as metaphor for selfhood, 147 and modernism, 140 Green, Henry, 7, 31 ‘Before the Great Fire’, 65 Caught, 66–71 ‘The Lull’, 72–3 Party Going, 37–40, 66 and rewriting, 67 Greene, Graham Brighton Rock, 1 The Ministry of Fear, 141–7 ‘Notes on the Way’, 5, 141 The Third Man, 38

Guernica, 23, 105 guild halls, 187 H. D., ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’, 188 Haldane, J. B. S. A.R.P., 22 Hamilton, Patrick Hangover Square, 40–6 Impromptu in Moribundia, 41 Hart, Liddell, 44 Hauser, Kitty, 33 Hemingway, Ernest ‘London Fights the Robots’, 6 Hendry, J. F., 9, 93, 103–9 ‘The Anatomy of War’, 107 The Bombed Happiness, 107 The Orchestral Mountain, 103–9 Hendry, J. F., ed. The New Apocalypse, 104–31 Hendry, J. F., and Treece, Henry, eds. The Crown and the Sickle, 107 The White Horseman, 106 Henrey, Robert, 189 Hersey, John, 204 Hillary, Richard, 9 Hiroshima, 204 Holden, Inez, 86 invasion scare literature, 17 Jefferies, Richard After London, 168–70 Jennings, Humphrey, 8, 131 A Defeated People, 134 Fires Were Started, 49, 133, 134 ‘I SeeÂ€London’, 132–3 ideas of salvage in filmic form, 133 Listen to Britain, 133 London Can Take It, 131, 132 The True Story of Lili Marlene, 122 Jones, David, 9, 112 The Anathemata, 147–55 ‘Art in Relation to War’, 150 and footnotes, 154–5 likens writing to guerrilla warfare, 149 ‘Religion and the Muses’, 149 and salvage in poetry, 156 Wedding Poems, 148, 154 Kavan, Anna ‘Glorious Boys’, 162 ‘Our City’, 162, 163 Langdon-Davies, John Air Raid, 24

243

244 Le Queux, William, 18 The Terror of the Air, 11, 18–19 Listen to Britain, 135 Lorca, Fredrico Garcia, 29 Mabey, Richard The Unofficial Countryside, 199 Macaulay, Rose botanising in ruins, 178 and forgery, 193–4 ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, 189–91 The Pleasure of Ruins, 195–7 sentence structure, 176 The World My Wilderness, 173–8, 185–8 MacKay, Marina, 4, 102 MacNeice, Louis, 7 Autumn Journal, 33, 35–7 ‘Brother Fire’, 59, 62 ‘How We Live Now’, 64 ‘London Letter 1’, 6 ‘The Morning After the Blitz’, 63, 64, 65 ‘The Stones Cry Out’ (radio broadcasts), 65 Strings Are False, The, 62 ‘The Trolls’, 59 ‘Troll’s Courtship’, 60 Mansfield, Katherine, 14 maps, 174 Marvell, Andrew, 192 Mass-Observation; 89–90, 131 SeeÂ€Surrealism Maxwell, Gavin, 140 McLoughlin, Kate, 4 Mengham, Rod, 50 Miller, Lee, 122–30 ‘1 Nonconformist chapel + 1 bomb = Greek Temple’, 124 ‘Blast pays tribute’, 126 Britain Under Fire, 128 and captions, 124 ‘Remington Silent’, 124 modernism and 1939, 31 centrality to British culture, 3 and periodicity, 4 and prolepsis, 5, 86 Naess, Arne, 202 Nash, Paul, 90 neo-romanticism, 92 New Apocalypse, 101–9 Nicholls, Peter, 92 O’Donovan, Gerald, 190 Orwell, George, 7

Index Coming Up for Air, 37–40 ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, 45 Patterson, Ian, 15 Peake, Mervyn Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, 189 ‘London, 1941’, 10 Penrose, Roland, 92 Piette, Adam, 4, 59 Plymouth, 99 Pollard, Leslie, Menace, 19, 20 Powell, Michael and Emeric Pressburger The 49th Parallel, 84 A Canterbury Tale, 184 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 184 Rawlinson, Mark, 4, 51 Read, Herbert, 137 Remy, Michel, 90 Rhys, Keidrych, 76 Richards, J. M., 126 Rickwood, Edgell, 24 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 75 Roberts, Lynette ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’, 113 filmic poetic forms, 112 Gods with Stainless Ears, 114–15 ‘Lamentation’, 113 ‘Swansea Raid’, 111–12 ‘The Temple Road’, 114 rosebay willowherb, ix, 171, 179, 180, 181 Roughton, Roger, 89 ruins and aesthetics, 2, 126, 195–7 as the background to Second World War culture, 1–2 and classical precedents, 22, 64, 124 and European culture, 3 as playgrounds, 183 and popular culture, 3 in post Second World War science fiction, 197–200 and shrines, 100 and titles of paintings. SeeÂ€Graham Sutherland and traumatic modernity, 3 as a way to understand selfhood, 109, 145 Salton-Cox, Glyn, 45 Sandburg, Carl, 182 Sansom, William, 8 and allegory, 53 The Body, 58 and the body a site of narrative, 58

Index ‘Building Alive’, 52, 55 ‘Cat Up a Tree’, 58 and distorted time, 53 ‘Fireman Flower’, 49 ‘From the Water Junction’, 54 ‘The Long Sheet’, 53–4 ‘The Maze’, 55 ‘In the Morning’, 55 ‘Journey into Smoke’, 56 ‘Saturation Point’, 57 ‘The Vertical Ladder’, 58 ‘The Wall’, 51–2, 56, 57 Shakespeare, William, 194 Skelton, Robin, 75 Spanish Civil War, 13, 30 Speer, Albert, 6 Spender, Stephen, 2, 101 Air Raids, 115 Citizens at War and After, 51 ‘Destruction and Resurrection’, 61 European Witness, 6 World within World, 61 Steer, George, 23 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 7, 183 Stonehenge, desire to bomb, 13 Stonier, G. W. The Memoirs of a Ghost, 164 surrealism and the concept of the fragment, 136 exhibition at Zwemmers gallery (1940), 85 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936), 87 literalised by war, 85, 86, 101 and organic forms, 92, 109, 117 and a postwar legacy, 136, 137 pre-war significance in Britain, 86–90 Sutherland, Graham, 116 Devastation 1941 – City, Twisted Girders, 118 Devastation 1941 – City, Ruined Machinery in a Mantle Factory, 119 Devastation 1941 – East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse, 118 illustrations for David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–42, 121 pre-war career, 116, 117 work in France as a war artist, 121

245

Swansea, 109 Sykes-Davis, Hugh, 88 Thomas, Dylan, 76, 90 ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’, 78 ‘The Burning Baby’, 82 ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’, 80, 82 ‘Deaths and Entrances’, 81 Our Country, 82, 83, 91 Thomas, Edward ‘Adlestrop’, 171 The South Country, 171 Treece, Henry, ‘An Apocalyptic Writer and the Surrealists’, 102 Upward, Edward, 86 War Artists Advisory Committee, 116 Waters, Sarah The Night Watch, 203 Waugh, Evelyn Put Out More Flags, 85 Weisman, Alan The World Without Us, 201 Wells, H. G. The War in the Air, 11, 12, 138 The War of the Worlds, 170 William-Ellis, Clough England and the Octopus, 13 Williams, Charles All Hallow’s Eve, 163 ‘The Image of the City in English Verse’, 163 Wintringham, Tom, 184 Woodward, Christopher, 3, 168 Woolf, Virginia, 13, 74 Between the Acts, 32–3, 35 ‘The Death of the Moth’, 34 ‘Flying Over London’, 34 Mrs Dalloway, 15 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid’, 35 Wright, Patrick, 21 Wyndham, John ‘Meteor’, 197 The Day of the Triffids, 198 Zeppelins, 14–15, 173

Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

Reading The waste land: modernism and the limits of interpretation

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de SiГЁcle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930

The Ruins

The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity

the Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation

Monster Theory: Reading Culture

Re-reading Popular Culture

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism

Monster Theory: Reading Culture

The Ruins

British Culture: An Introduction

The Ruins

The Ruins

Modernism and the Ordinary

Ruins

Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

Ruins

Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture

Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

Reading The waste land: modernism and the limits of interpretation

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de SiГЁcle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930

The Ruins

The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity

the Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation

Monster Theory: Reading Culture

Re-reading Popular Culture

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism

Monster Theory: Reading Culture

The Ruins

British Culture: An Introduction

The Ruins

The Ruins

Modernism and the Ordinary

Ruins

Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

The Ruins

Ruins

Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture

Recommend Documents