I FLEW BACK TO LONDON in the middle of July and, being attached to the Army now, was given an army billet. This was a dreadful little hotel in Half Moon Street, which accommodated both Americans and British. The elevator was so tiny that you could hardly get into it with another person and so flimsy that you could feel the boards of the floor giving under your weight. I took to walking up and downstairs, though in the confusion of dark stairways and corridors that were shut off from one another, I would sometimes find myself in a cul de sac and have to go all the way back down and start up another flight. My room, which looked out on low chimney-pots, was a cubbyhole of yellow walls that contained a little prisonlike daybed, with the greasy marks of heads above it and a horrible brown cover impregnated with pounds of dust; a wooden washstand that had no towel: you were supposed to supply your own; a brown carpet with a rhomboidal pattern, also much stained and full of dust; and, in one corner, a small dung-colored coal grate which contained small and dismal gas-logs. In the other corners large piles of dirt had been swept up and left in plain sight. Down below in the dining room, the clothless tables seemed never to have been wiped, for they were soiled with innumerable spillings of soup, gravy, eggs, jam and tea; and you were waited on by slovenly skivvies so pallidly unappetizing that they made the meager food seem more tasteless.
I soon discovered that this odd little nexus of streets just off the Green Park was one of the headquarters of the London whores. Most of the three- or four-story hotels are evidently hôtels borgnes, and the obvious conclusion is that my billet is a converted brothel. In the middle of all this, at the foot of the street, you find a little Christian Science church, which manages to look almost as old and gray as any other church in London.
It is nearly as hot here as in Rome; and the worst of it is that, whereas in Rome you can at least go around without a jacket—since in summer a shirt with insignia is regulation in the Mediterranean—here in London, as is characteristic of onerous British convention, you have to do all your walking and travelling in a buttoned-up and belted uniform, with your shirt always soaked in sweat.
At night there is still almost as little light as there was before the end of the war, and a section that has been badly blasted, like the Tottenham Court Road, looks gruesome in the late-gathering darkness: its bare and wry trees with tufts of leaves at the tips of the branches like the legs and necks of plucked fowl; its masklike fronts of bombed-out houses, with their dark eye-sockets and gaping jaws. There is a peculiar desolation and horror about finding these carcases of streets unburied in the midst of an inhabited city.
Piccadilly is crawling with life, but equally repellent in its different way. The summer murk, stagnant and tepid, is eddying with the aimless movement of the British and American soldiers and the deteriorated London tarts that circulate slowly or clot in groups. The purposes of the fighting accomplished, the tensions of wartime relaxed, these uniformed and dog-tagged men now find themselves immersed like amebas in the swampy backwater of England. What has the war worked up to?—nothing, vacuity—to these young males afloat in the foreign streets, with no training in directing themselves and with no strong impulse toward self-direction, merely responding to a rudimentary instinct to adhere to these floating females whose faces they can hardly make out.
How empty, how sickish, how senseless, everything suddenly seems the moment the war is over! We are left flat with the impoverished and humiliating life that the drive against the enemy kept our minds off. Where our efforts have all gone toward destruction, we have been able to build nothing at home to fall back on amidst our own ruin. Where the enemy are roofless and starving, where we have reduced their cities to rubble, we get now not even useful plunder or readily exploitable empire, but merely an extension, a more wearisome load, of harassing demands and duties.
The novelist Graham Greene said to me the other day that they sometimes thought to themselves, now that the war was over: “If one could only hear the hum of a robot bomb!” Life had been dramatic because dangerous. Everything one did was pointed up, was lived with a special awareness, because it might be the last thing one did, and now they missed this: life was safe but blank. No doubt Greene’s rather saturnine nature, his addiction to the peculiar excitements of pursuit and persecution, count for something in his nostalgia for the buzz of the V-I’s; but then, Greene himself and his themes are partly products of the conditions of the period, of which a fundamental insecurity has been so much a permanent feature that, once having adjusted themselves to it, the English do not know how to live without it.
G., a London girl whom I very much liked, struck the same sort of note when she complained that the headlines were dull. One was used to reading of cities in flames, infernal concentration camps laid open, German officials killing themselves and their families; the murderous and crushing revenge, like the progress of a gigantic tank, for the assault on one’s own cities. And now the crescendo had ceased: the nerves no longer felt the stimulus that had been shocking them every day like the insulin and electric current which, applied to schizophrenic cases, was supposed to give them lucid spells. She had written me of the disappointing flatness of the V-Day celebration in England and of her own depression and apathy at the parties where people had tried to be gay; and now she told me ghastly stories of men she knew who, after years in German jails, had just got back to England. One of these had turned Communist in prison, and was now so appalled and unsettled by what he found at home that his first reaction had been to long to go back to prison, where he had at least known which side he was on and had been able to remain true to his principles. Another had come back to his wife and had stayed with her only two weeks. During his absence, she had had a lover, to whom she had become accustomed, and had taken rather badly to drink. He, on his side, had always been a gambler, and imprisonment had encouraged this taste. In prison he had done nothing but gamble and even used to bet with his friends on which and how many prisoners were going to be converted by the Roman Catholic priest. He found he could not get on with his wife, left the country and came to London, where he completely gave himself up to gambling. A third man had been playing the women’s roles in the shows that they had put on in jail, and his companions, who had not seen a woman for years, began behaving toward him in daily life as if he were an attractive girl to be treated with consideration, relieved of unpleasant tasks and courted—with the result that he had gradually developed, in response to the pressure of this attitude—he was apparently not a case of congenital homosexuality—a feminine personality of which he found that he was unable to rid himself. He hardly knew to which sex he belonged.
(I later met, in the United States, a young man who had spent five years in prison-camps and had talked with a woman but once, and then only the Mother Superior of a convent, of whom, through a little grating, he had been able to see only the hands. On rare occasions when they heard women’s voices, these had sounded extremely queer. After so long a confinement, he said, during which one had been always under orders, with every moment of one’s time assigned, it was incredibly painful and frightening to find oneself at large in London and to have to do things for oneself. It required a great effort of thought and will even to bring oneself to the point of walking down the steps to the Tube, buying a ticket and boarding the train.)
G. herself, who is always wound-up and looks physically rather frail, seems to have felt the nervous pressure increase instead of lessening since the end of the war. She has a job in the department of “economic propaganda” and has worked in London all through the bombing, when, as she says, you sometimes thought you “couldn’t stick it.” A house a few doors from her flat was blown up when she was at home one night. But, now that the war is over, she suffers more than ever from claustrophobia—feels oppressed by day in her office and is dismal with people at night. In between her regular work and dinner, she takes lessons in Italian and Turkish, in the hope of getting herself sent out to Italy or the East.
She is an extremely bright and able girl, with the same sort of all-around competence that the young Englishmen from the universities have. The English women I have met in London have been in general a pleasant surprise. The clever ones are more sympathetic than the same kind of people at home, because they usually have quiet manners and do not try to compete with the men. When they are beautiful, they are beautiful in a feminine way that is a relief after the dashing and aggressive “style” which is directed, on the part of our women, almost more, perhaps, at women than at men. At the same time, I note that G. has one habit which American girls have and which I have come to regard as significant of a change in the status of women. When she is standing and wants to rest, she puts forward one foot with the toe up, resting it on her heel, where the more maidenly older pose involved bending in one knee and leaning one thigh against the other. But these English girls talk the men’s language: the crisp laconic schoolboy code that makes everything matter-of-fact or droll, and that has its own kind of charm after the challenging wisecracks of our women. G. combines this with something else which seems to me extremely old English, a more formal turn of phrase in a style probably characteristic of her clergyman father, now dead, which is matched by her beautiful handwriting, with its distinctly detached letters, its deftly twisted ampersands and its incised serifs and shadings. “I think I talk like a don, you know,” she says; and she tells me that she can never decide whether to regard herself as “the gamine type” or “the serious type.”
She has also—what does seem to me unusual here—along with her matter-of-factness, a volatility of mood and expression of a kind that always enchants me in women; the beauty that seems to derive from a spirit which inhabits the body rather than from the body itself. This spirit, in G., sleeps or wakes, fades or flushes, is méchant or merry, flits about through a repertory of several roles, and has its moments of strength and of weakness. Sometimes she looks frightened or a little out of focus, with the two sides of her face not in harmony: one pert, the other chagrined; sometimes on guard and alert, like a keen-eyed quiet baby fox that makes quick silent darting movements; sometimes lovely with delicate coloring or electric with the kind of intensity in which feeling and intellect mix. Sometimes, dressed to go out, her hair caught up from her forehead and ears and done in a knot at the back of her head, she looks grown-up and very handsome, with the hard English chic.
One evening, just before dinner, I made her keep still and wrote down a little sketch of her as she sat in her living room: “Pale slight figure in gray suit and white collar, with slim legs that show pink through gray stockings and too-large old white high-heeled shoes that are the best that can be had in wartime. Against yellow lamplight, her profiled face shows grayish-pink, too. Very fine though rather irregular features. Sharp and longish nose, with a hump and dip in the bridge, that is assertive and shows curiosity. Sharp shoulders, perhaps mainly due to tailoring; soft, delicate and palely-veined neck under pointed little forward-thrust chin, with slight rounded flesh underneath. But the lower part of her face, with its very small mouth, is less strongly developed than the upper. Soft yellowish hair that grows low on her forehead and—worn thus with a feminine tossed effect—has a suggestion of lion’s mane; it is balanced in color by the gold of the bracelets on one of her wrists, as she sits with her capable non-tapering fingers clasped about her knee. But the features that give her face its chief accent are her little diamond-bright blue eyes that might almost be used to cut glass or as points for Johanssen gauges. Beneath her finely drawn-in eyebrows, they look sometimes cold and sharp-pricking, sometimes twinkling and cute.”
Her figure has disproportions of largeness and longness with smallness and shortness, which, instead of being disconcerting, are altogether a part of her attractiveness—because they seem to correspond with her complexity. I found, for example, on this visit, when I had bought her some silk stockings from Italy, that her feet, which I had remembered as tiny, were several sizes bigger than I had thought. And this discovery at once disappointed me in that it seemed to destroy the image of an exquisite little figure that I had carried from my previous visit, and pleased me because it added to her piquancy and revealed a firm base in substance for solid qualities of intellect and character with which I was coming to credit her.
Her way of receiving these stockings and some other things I had brought her from Italy seemed to me very English and, especially, very post-war English. There were an antique veil for the hair and an antique black lace fan, two pairs of earrings, the stockings, the new book by Silone, whom G. greatly admired, and an Italian magazine that had in it a short story by Moravia called L’Ufficiale Inglese, which, perhaps with a certain malice, I wanted people in England to read, a carton of cigarettes from the American PX and two bottles of some sparkling Italian wine—which were received with a coolness and a minimum of comment that might have made me feel that I had overdone playing Santa Claus if they had not at once been whisked away as if sucked up by a vacuum-cleaner. It would be beside the point, with the English, to complain of ungraciousness of manners since what they aim at is a dryness and curtness that has nothing to do with grace; but it was interesting to note the difference between G.’s way of receiving presents and the transports or emphatic approval of the ordinary American girl. The attitude of Leonor Fini, the painter, whom I had got to know in Rome and who had asked me to bring her some paints and brushes from London, was also quite different from G.’s. In the magnificent Italian way, she offered me my choice of her drawings, any one of which was valued at more than the materials I had bought her; and, when I hesitated between two, insisted on my taking them both. When I afterwards showed an interest in a handsome new album of Pollaiuolo, she made me take this, too, declaring that she had two copies, and, as I was leaving, remarked that she would send me some new books in which she thought I might be interested. I do not in the least, by these contrasts, intend to be invidious at G.’s expense. The incident was one of many which made me see how the privations of the war had intensified to a ravenous voracity the appetite for property of the English, for whom permanent family possessions, tangible personal belongings, a steady supply of food and goods, have always been important in a different way than they are to Italians or Americans. It was not, I am sure, that G. had not appreciated my gifts—she later, in the same inexpressive way and with no suggestion from me, did me a great service, which I shall tell about further on; but, even aside from her “British phlegm,” she was too dead serious about things like silk stockings to put on a polite little act.
When I had just come to London in April and was taken one evening by English friends to dine in a first-class restaurant, I ordered “roast duck” as a dish that sounded attractive and normal. I noticed, however, that the Londoners approached the menu with a certain quiet wariness, and that none of them selected duck. The duck, indeed, when it came, turned out to be disappointing: it consisted of little dry and tough slivers from a bird that seemed incredibly thin for even a poorly-fed barnyard fowl. The other day, when I was walking with G. through one of the narrow streets near Holborn, we found ourselves inhaling a foul stale smell, and, looking round, saw a little market, on the shelves of whose open windows were laid out rows and rows of dead crows. That was apparently all they sold in that shop.
I took G. somewhere in a taxi in the rain and, as I was dropping her, saw a well-dressed woman who was waiting to get a cab. I was going in her direction and took her to Oxford Street. Seeing my war correspondent’s insignia, she asked me where I had been, and, when I said that I had just come from Italy, she inquired how things were there. In very bad shape, I told her. “But they’re very light-hearted about it, aren’t they?” I replied that this was not my impression. She said at once that she had understood that the Italians were “very unwilling to do anything for themselves.” I don’t remember whether I answered that the Allied Commission in Italy were making it extremely difficult for the Italians to do anything for themselves; but it seemed to me that this lady’s remarks were typical of the attitude of the English toward the damage that has been done by our side. It is true no doubt, as was said to me by an Englishman on my earlier visit to London, when the Allies were advancing on Berlin, that the English so hate destruction that they have been made to feel uneasy and guilty by the ruin they have wrought in Europe; but it is equally characteristic of the English that they should always try to present the picture in such a way as to make it appear that their opponents don’t really mind having their buildings and people blown up or that it is somehow the fault of the negligence of those foreign and inferior races that one should find them in such a mess.
I was a little taken aback one evening for which I had had vague other plans to find that I was going with G. to a new opera by Benjamin Britten which was being done at Sadler’s Wells. She had bought the tickets herself and said nothing about it in advance. The only thing I had heard by Britten had been a Requiem that had not much impressed me, and I did not feel particularly eager to sit through an English opera called Peter Grimes, based on an episode from Crabbe. G. did try, with her usual lack of emphasis, to get me to read the libretto, of which she had procured a copy, but she did not explain that this work had been something of a sensation in London, where the critics, who, like me, had not at first expected anything extraordinary, had been roused from their neat routine to the point of hearing it several times and writing two or three articles about it. But she knew that I ought to hear it, and it is one of my debts to G. that she made me go to Peter Grimes, which I should unquestionably otherwise have missed.
For, almost from the moment when the curtain went up on the bare room in the provincial Moot Hall—which no overture had introduced—where the fisherman Peter Grimes was being examined at a coroner’s inquest in connection with the death of his apprentice, I felt the power of a musical gift and a dramatic imagination that woke my interest and commanded my attention. There have been relatively few composers of the first rank who had a natural gift for the theater: Mozart, Musorgsky, Verdi, Wagner, the Bizet of Carmen. To be confronted, without preparation, with an unmistakable new talent of this kind is an astonishing, even an electrifying, experience. The difficulty of describing Peter Grimes to someone who has not heard it is the difficulty of convincing people whose expectations are likely to be limited by having listened to too much modern music that was synthetic, arid, effortful and inadequate, that a new master has really arrived; of conveying to them the special qualities of a full-grown original artist. In my own case, I am particularly handicapped by lack of technical knowledge and training, so that I can only give an account of the opera’s spell without being able to analyze it intelligently. The best I can do, then, is to report my impression—subject to expert correction—that Britten’s score shows no signs of any of the dominant influences—Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg or Prokofiev—but has been phrased in an idiom that is personal and built with a definiteness and solidity that are as English as Gilbert and Sullivan (one can find, for an English opera, no other comparison in the immediate past). And the result of this is very different from anything we have been used to. The ordinary composer of opera finds his conventions there with the stage; but, when you are watching Peter Grimes, you are almost completely unaware of anything that is artificial, anything “operatic.” The composer here seems quite free from the self-consciousness of contemporary musicians. You do not feel you are watching an experiment; you are living a work of art. The opera seizes upon you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end.
The orchestra, in Peter Grimes, plays a mainly subordinate role, and the first effect on the hearer, during the opening scene in the Moot Hall, is of a drastic simplification of opera to something essential and naked, which immediately wakes one up. There is no Wagnerian web of motifs that tells you about the characters: the characters express themselves directly, either conversing or soliloquizing in song, while the orchestra, for the most part, but comments. The music is a close continuity, though articulated rather than fluid, of vivid utterances on the part of the personages and—except in the more elaborate interludes—sharp and terse descriptive strokes, in which from time to time take shape arias, duets, trios and choruses. These—almost never regular in pattern and never losing the effect of naturalness—have their full or fragmentary developments, and give way to the next urgent pulse of the blood-stream that runs through the whole piece. In the same way, the words of the libretto, by the poet Montague Slater, which are admirably suited to the music and which the music exactly fits, shift sometimes into the imagery of poetry but never depart far from the colloquial and are sometimes—with no loss of dignity—left perfectly bald and flat. But we soon come to recognize in the music the extraordinary flexibility, the subtlety and the variety, which are combined with a stout British craftsmanship that has a sure hand with mortise and tenon and that knows how to plant and mass a chorus, and with a compelling theatrical sense, an instinct for tempo and point. And—what is most uncommon with opera—we find ourselves touched and stirred at listening to an eloquence of voices that does not merely charm or impress us as the performance of well-trained singers but that seems sometimes to reach us directly with the emotions of actual people. Nor do these voices find their expression exclusively through the singers’ roles: one of the most effective devices of Peter Grimes is the use of the orchestral interludes that take place between the scenes while the curtain is down. Thus at the end of the first scene in the Moot Hall, where you have just been seeing Peter Grimes consoled by Ellen Orford, the schoolteacher, the only being in the town who cares for him, the orchestra develops a theme which seems to well up out of Ellen’s heart, and then rises and falls with a plangency that, sustained through the long passage with marvellous art, conveys, as if her spirit were speaking, her sympathy and pain for Peter. And at the end of the scene that follows, when a storm has been heard coming up as Balstrode, the retired captain, has been trying to remonstrate with Peter over his plan to take another apprentice and prove to the town that he is not a monster, the winds and the waves break loose the moment the curtain falls, fiendishly yelping and slapping in a way that represents with realism—Britten was born on the Suffolk coast—the worrying raving crescendo of an equinoctial gale but that howls at the same time with the fierceness of Peters rebellious pride and of the latent sadistic impulse of which he is half unconscious but to which the new situation will eventually give free rein. The sea’s restive and pressing movement has been all through the scene that preceded, and in the next, in the local tavern to which the people have resorted for warmth and cheer, the hurricane wildly intrudes whenever the door is opened and at last, with the entrance of Grimes, rushes into the room to stay. This long act, which is brought to its climax by the silence that greets Peter’s appearance and that concentrates the hostility of the town, and by the arrival of the orphan whom, the carrier refusing, Ellen has herself gone to fetch and for whose welfare she hopes to make herself responsible—this act has an intensity and an impetus that carries one through, without a moment’s letdown, from the opening to the end. Nor is what follows much less effective. The whole drama is a stretching of tension between the inquest and the inevitable crisis when Grimes will, if not deliberately kill, at least cause the death of, the second apprentice; and I do not remember ever to have seen, at any performance of opera, an audience so steadily intent, so petrified and held in suspense, as the audience of Peter Grimes. This is due partly to the dramatic skill of Britten, but it is due also to his having succeeded in harmonizing, through Peter Grimes, the harsh helpless emotions of wartime. This opera could have been written in no other age, and it is one of the very few works of art that have seemed to me, so far, to have spoken for the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of these horrible years. Its grip on its London audiences is clearly of the same special kind as the grip of the recent productions of Richard III and The Duchess of Malfi. Like them, it is the chronicle of an impulse to persecute and to kill which has become an obsessive compulsion, which drags the malefactor on—under a fatality which he does not understand, from which he can never get free, and which never leaves him even the lucidity for repentance or reparation—through a series of uncontrollable cruelties which will lead, in the long run, to his being annihilated himself. At first you think that Peter Grimes is Germany. He is always under the impression, poor fellow, that what he really wants for himself is to marry Ellen Orford and to live in a nice little cottage with children and fruit in the garden “and whitened doorstep and a woman’s care.” Above all, he wants to prove to his neighbors that he is not the scoundrel they think him, that he really means no harm to his apprentices and that he will make a good family man. But he cannot help flying into a fury when the boy does not respond to his will, and when he gets angry, he beats him; and his townsmen become more and more indignant. At last, shouting, “Peter Grimes!,” they go on the march against him, determined to capture him and make him pay, just at the moment when he has paused and relented, and when their approach will precipitate, in his dash to escape, his pushing the boy so that he falls over the cliff, which is finally to settle his fate. (A comparison of the text of the opera with the story as told by Crabbe in The Borough shows that Britten and Montague Slater—though they have used here and there a few lines from Crabbe—have put Peter in a different situation and invented for him a new significance. The outlaw fisherman in Crabbe is married, though his wife does not figure in the story, and he has no connection with Ellen Orford, who is the heroine of a separate episode. The mainspring of the original version is Peter’s rebellion against his father: he is in Crabbe completely anti-social and has no hankering for middle-class decency.) But, by the time you are done with the opera—or by the time it is done with you—you have decided that Peter Grimes is the whole of bombing, machine-gunning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity, which talks about a guaranteed standard of living yet does nothing but wreck its own works, degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation. You feel, during the final scenes, that the indignant shouting trampling mob which comes to punish Peter Grimes is just as sadistic as he. And when Balstrode gets to him first and sends him out to sink himself in his boat, you feel that you are in the same boat as Grimes.
Every night when I walked back to Half Moon Street, I ran the gauntlet of the innumerable prostitutes that lined Piccadilly and the Green Park. They would brush you with “Come heah, Sweetie!” or a simple “Hullo!” in their low quiet London voices that, with their pale dimly-looming forms, made them seem a part of the night like moths. There was one of them who gave me the impression of being more or less well-bred, for she talked the schoolboy language like G. and would say to me, “Can’t I tempt you?,” as if she were offering me a cake or a drink. One night when I had lost my way in the queer little tangle of streets behind the Christian Science church, a tough, short and stocky blond wench, almost like some hussy of Rowlandson’s, of whom I had asked the way and who was going in my direction, steered me good-naturedly to my sordid hotel. She tried to take advantage of the occasion to do a bit of business, but I replied, in an attempt to discourage her, that I had just been to see a friend. “In other words, you’ve had it,” she said. “Charming!”
One night, wandering back at loose ends, I picked up a really good-looking girl who accosted me in French. She was the only such woman that I had yet seen in London who was not frankly down-at-heels and disreputable. A vigorous well-filled-out brunette with a bright smile of strong white teeth, she was wearing a brown suit, a béret and relatively little make-up. She came from Montmartre, she told me, and had been in London since 1939. Her aim was to go back to Paris and open a lingerie shop. During the day, she worked wrapping up parcels at the French Red Cross; and for the purposes of her traffic at night she did not use the harlots’ hotels, but had a well-kept room in a house that was inhabited entirely by French girls. It was impressive, as a feat of French character, to see how these girls stuck together and how astutely they had organized their affairs. Everything here was on a higher level of decency than among the native prostitutes of London. I was talking about this, when I got back to Rome, with Alberto Moravia, the novelist, who had lived for a time in England, and he said truly that the point was that in France prostitution was a recognized profession which did not involve the loss of self-respect, whereas, in England, a woman who took to the streets was consigned to the dregs of society and could no longer keep up any standards. She was now simply a tart or a whore, which is quite different from being une petite femme—what Odette, my French friend, always called herself. The English girls, as a rule, looked blowzy and behaved vulgarly, and they mostly gave the impression of being diseased. But Odette was in good shape and handsome, and conducted her commerce with men with the same sort of efficiency and dignity with which she would have run her shop. She was scrupulously hygienic, and had availed herself of every resource to eliminate both squalor and risk.
It was all like a little chunk of Paris embedded in darkest densest London. Though Odette had been in England six years, she had learned only a few words of English and talked French in a polite and conventional way that would have done perfect credit to the proprietress of a pension de famille. She had on tap all the correct formulations, and when she used, as she did not do often, a word of argot that she saw I did not understand—as when she tactfully remarked, in connection with the outburst of de Gaulle against Britain over its attitude toward French interests in Syria, that she “didn’t know what de Gaulle had taken into his ciboule”—she would immediately explain what this meant. She described to me with clarity but discretion the characteristics of the various nationalities as she had encountered them in the course of her business. The English were very cold: unbuttoned, buttoned up, and then goodby! the Canadians were “ordinaires.” Some of the Poles were nice. But “il n’y a que les Français, les Belges et les Américains pour faire l’amour.” The Americans were rather “bruyants,” but then they were “loin de chez eux” and no doubt behaved better at home; and, in any case, they were gay to go out with and really liked to have a good time. She would have nothing to do with blacks, and one night when she had been spoken to by an officer who turned out to be a Negro, she had said she had another engagement.
I saw her several times and used to pay her to stay on and talk, but merely talking made her nervous and restless, and she would begin knitting energetically on a sweater that she told me she was making for the director of the French Red Cross. If she had had to buy it, she said, it would have cost her several pounds, but this way it cost only a few shillings. She discussed her expenses and savings with exactitude and in detail, and declared that, what with the rental of her relatively high-grade room, she wasn’t able to save very much; but I am perfectly sure she saved something.
I had lunch in an old London club, full of dark staircases and antique engravings, very pleasant in its privacy and comfort, and quite different from the elevator-served and more hotel-like clubs of New York. The lunch was much the best and the most abundant that I had had anywhere in London. They had managed to keep themselves supplied with excellent vegetables and cheeses and various kinds of meat, as not even the best restaurants were, and seemed secure in their privileged position.
When I left with the friend who had brought me, we stood on the curb for some minutes trying to catch a taxi; but at last, just as we thought we had one, a man snatched it under our noses, and we decided to give it up and walk on. My companion must have known the man, for he remarked: “It’s a kind of Hell—eternally waiting in the street while one watches all the people one most loathes getting into taxis and driving off.” He was not naturally an unamiable man, and it seemed to me that his comment was typical of the general state of mind to which England was now reduced: a combination of competitive spitefulness with exasperated patience.
I looked up Harold Laski and went around with him to some Labour meetings in the industrial towns outside London. From the houses of gray “roughcast” or yellow brick, with their small bay-windows and dull red-tiled roofs, the pale men and women and boys and girls emerged in gray or blue or khaki to sit quietly and listen to the speakers with concentrated and anxious attention. These occasions seemed a great deal more serious than anything else of the kind that I remembered to have seen in America, including even labor-union meetings and the rallies of the Left-Wing parties. The routine of a presidential campaign looked, beside them, like perfunctory clowning.
Laski put on a very good performance, and he received a resounding ovation. People crowded around our car to get a glimpse of the professor from Oxford who was working for their side and who was just then being denounced by the Beaverbrook press. The situation was that Churchill had invited Clement Attlee to be present at the Berlin Conference, and that Laski, the chairman of the Labour Party, had announced that, if Attlee attended, it would be as an observer only, and that the decisions made by the Conference would not affect the future foreign policy of Labour. This statement had been seized upon by Beaverbrook as a pretext for raising an alarm against the sinister hidden hand of Socialism, which, in the event of a victory for Labour, would be manipulating puppet officials. But he had apparently made no impression on the supporters of the Labour candidates, for whom Laski had now come to speak. These people were much too badly off and had much too grim a prospect before them to be excited by the antics of journalists. The only thing that mattered to them was that the Labour Party was promising quick action on housing, education and jobs. Churchill, as Laski reminded them, had said that he was “in favor of the traditional Britain, with a few measures of practical construction”; and now Laski was declaring that “mass unemployment was incompatible with democratic institutions,” and that they “must never again allow such a degradation of conditions as had occurred between the two wars.” As for foreign affairs: he was loudly applauded when he told them that the people of Europe and Asia, “bound in chains,” were “reaching out for the Four Freedoms,” and that the Labour Party, if elected to office, could not undertake to follow the policies of the party that had allowed China and Spain, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia, to fall victims one by one to the Japanese and the Fascists, and which was still, in Italy and Greece, backing the reactionary elements and trying to reinstate the very kings who had delivered their countries over to the Fascists and who had no longer any popular support.
He reminded them that, in the “traditional Britain” which Mr. Churchill wanted to perpetuate, one per cent of the population owned fifty per cent of the wealth; that, in the Army, only one per cent of the officers came from working-class parents; and that in 1939, at the time war had broken out, sixty-seven per cent of the diplomatic corps had gone to school at Eton. Well, they all knew that the Battle of Peterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton and that the Battle of Sidney Street had been won on the playing-fields of Harrow! (References to the Manchester Massacre of 1819, when soldiers charged with sabers a meeting held to petition for parliamentary reform, and to an incident in the twenties when Churchill, as Home Secretary, went personally, pistol in hand, after some foreigner, a political refugee, who was supposed to be a dangerous character.) Yet I noticed that the speaker did not hesitate to call attention to his own upper-class education. I heard him explain more than once, in connection with social inequalities, that he himself, in being born, had “had the good sense to choose rich parents,” who had sent him to a public school; and he made a conventional joke about his coming from “the best university—by which I of course mean Oxford.” (I remembered that he had been telling me, on the train coming down, about a book by some liberal peer, who showed brilliantly how impossible it was “to get a real education at Oxford.”) Well, this kind of thing, I reflected, would never have gone down in America from such a speaker before such an audience; but I imagined that Harold Laski knew perfectly what he was doing, and that he was not merely aiming to create prestige by appealing to the deep-rooted snobbery which is supposed to prevail in England, but also, or perhaps solely, to disarm any possible resentment of his Oxford manner and accent. The alternative would have been, I suppose, to pretend to be apologetic about them—which would have been found a good deal more objectionable. In America, the differences in the way people talk, though considerable, are less noticeable than in England; and where the factory worker’s son may very well go to some college, there is no clear issue of education. But in England the consciousness of class seems omnipresent and everlasting, and even in a campaign where the speaker is advocating “government ownership, under socialist control, of land and raw materials,” this factor has to be exploited or circumvented.
But I felt about Harold Laski, as, in Europe, I had already felt in connection with certain other figures, literary, artistic or political, whom I had met since the end of the war, that the processes of disintegration had now gone so far over here that people, if they were capable of seriousness, had now to be serious in a way that our well-fed and well-defended intellectuals had never lately been forced to be in America. If one was capable of good sense and courage, those qualities were aroused, were demanded, by this hour of moral slump; and they emerged with a moral dignity that differed from the heroism of wartime. There has always been in Harold Laski an element of intellectual vanity, of self-indulgence in his own virtuosity, of a confidence in his own resourcefulness which plays sometimes into a boyish sense of mischief, sometimes into the irresponsibility of taking himself, or letting others take, the appropriate and ready legend for the outlying uncivilized fact (as in his willingness to ignore or not to recognize the totalitarian tyranny of Stalin or in his habit of casting himself for a role in all his anecdotes of illustrious contemporaries). At these meetings, his cleverness and his competence, his quick wits in dealing with the problems of the moment, combined with his long-range capacity for absorbing and retaining data as well as for sticking to principle, were displayed in a striking way. He was adroit at disposing of hecklers—of the hired and coached kind, set up by the Conservatives and the Communists; marvellous at answering questions—he had the answer on the tip of his tongue the second that the questioner had finished; admirable in the homes of the Labour people, with whom and with whose wives and children he had no stiffness and knew just what to say. But I felt now as I had not done before, merely in talking to him or reading his writings, that he was more than an intellectual radical who formulated plausible positions. I felt that there was something in him of the real fighter for human rights, and that this had survived, through two wars, an era of chaos and panic, in rather an impressive way. At one moment—I was sitting on the platform and in a position to study the audience—I caught sight of an elderly woman (she may not have been so elderly as she looked), who sat with chin and nose thrust forward, eyes intent yet staring, and with a peculiar kind of hungriness and gauntness that caused one to recoil from the suggestion of something that was just on the edge of not being quite familiarly human—as if she belonged to a breed that was distinct from even the poor people of peacetime communities, to a breed with ravenous eyes like an animal’s that no longer took in the same things which the true human being saw but saw only with appetites that were simple and stringent. Such faces I had noticed in Milan just after the expulsion of the Germans; and I was coming, as they recurred, to recognize them as the type of wartime Europe. On the platform, erect before this woman and all her silent companions, stood Laski, slight, bespectacled, high-browed, making them promises which could not always perhaps be realized, amusing them with wisecracks and stories which were not always absolutely first-rate, talking to some degree the mere cant of politics, yet certainly kept up and held to his post by some tension that magnetized and turned him toward that craning gray-faced chicken-eyed woman.