By five in the morning we were cleared and I was walking around Liverpool. Drab scrawls along the docks read “HANDS OFF GREECE.” The docks were a maze of ships, cranes, muddy interior waterways, sudden yawning bomb holes that made me see Liverpool as the interior of the human body. I kept thinking of Melville arriving in Liverpool just a century before. I was dreaming it all, I could not possibly be walking English streets. But the grimness was what Melville had seen, and I stopped dreaming. “Poverty, poverty, poverty, in almost endless vistas; and want and woe staggered in arms along these miserable streets.”
In a cafeteria, a frayed tired-looking priest with a sharp nose and a very thin face was finishing up his breakfast with beans. Gathering a few leftover beans on his knife, he daintily lifted it to his mouth and ate off it one bean and then another with such deliberation that he seemed to be eating in slow motion. It took me a minute to realize that he was soused. Outside, the grand stony cupolas of the Victorian Board of Trade overlooked a city gashed, broken, and boarded up. The fatigue around you was like another layer of air in which you walked. Yet the spindly-looking girls in the shops, some of them still wearing head scarves and wraparound housedresses, looking as if they had just come in from the shelter or were expecting to run back at any moment, had a birdlike cheeping courtesy that astonished me. Their measured voices kept going up and up. Cahn-I-help-you? Cahn-I-help-you?
In the train to London that afternoon I sat across from a brassy fashion buyer who traveled constantly between London and Liverpool. She seized clawlike at the American clothes, the American accent. She wanted to know if “your Negroes do not pay a smaller income tax in the States,” they being so steadily oppressed by the likes of me and other white Americans? She was my first hint of the English obsession with America, and introduced me to the public English way of putting questions that were meant to provoke. Stubby fields and ancient farmhouses with thatched roofs glided past the train windows. In the dining car the hot gleaming teapots and scuffed glassy cups steadily sent back reflections of the fields of England while questions were regularly sent up at me. You Americans. Your America. Americans, Americans. The yawning gulf between us and you.
I had just arrived from another planet. After almost six years of war, a large part of which had been mounted against the people I was walking among, London was grimy in its daily militancy and wore the look of an old garment that had been poorly patched in many places. Everything at first glance wore the look of an emergency in which the whole population shared. Off Pall Mall the equestrian statue of Edward VII was surrounded by large wooden sheds marked “GAS CONTAMINATED MEN,” “GAS CONTAMINATED WOMEN.” At the entrances to the underground were sandbags and brick shields to deaden the effect of explosives. A lot of barbed wire to repel the invasion had been left over from 1940, as were the torn flapping posters that showed a friendly Bobby and the inscription “GET YOUR CHILD OUT OF LONDON” and the oddly pink and orange splotches on the walls of a bombed house that kept only a staircase, a child’s play wagon, and pipes dangling in space.
“LET US GO FORWARD TOGETHER,” said Churchill, scowling with firmly fixed jaw on the posters in the underground. People seemed to be on the move all day long, carrying briefcases from which a long French loaf stuck out at each end, attaché cases, knapsacks. People suddenly flopped down on the steps of ghostly white buildings in Whitehall, opened an attaché case to eat a sandwich in the street with enormous British circumspection, delicately wiped their fingers on a handkerchief, and trotted off again.
I lived in American billets just off Marble Arch underground station. Five feet away from the trains, sleeping on blankets or coats on the ground, many people were already early in the evening bedded down for the night. The luckier ones occupied three-tier iron bunks leaning against the station walls. Four and a half million houses were damaged or destroyed before the bombings ended; thousands of people slept every night in the subway stations of the West End. The authorities had tried to keep them out, but there they were, sleeping inside the round shell made by the thick deep-laid walls of the London underground and under hot round lamps. Many subway sleepers lacked homes entirely; others actually left their homes in the late afternoon to eat their dinner and to sleep in the deep shelters of the London underground—mostly elderly people, with a sprinkling of children.
There was one little old lady with glasses down her nose whom I came to know very well. Night after night that first week, I used to see her in her top bunk, primly dressed, reading the Church Times by the lamp in the station roof high over her head. Her head twisted out of her bunk to catch the light; one earpiece of her old-fashioned wire-frame glasses dangled. Other people took sandwiches and flasks of tea out of the ever-present British knapsack and watched their children playing follow-the-leader along the edge of the subway platform.
The blackout had been eased, they said; it was still dark enough for me. Except for the heavily shaded traffic signals at key intersections and the gigantic figures of light shakily climbing up from the mounds of anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, the city those freezing winter nights seemed hooded and mysteriously still. The silence was immense. The loneliness was immense. I felt shut out. “English!” I wanted to shout. “Where the hell are you, English?” I talked in the shadowy deserted streets with an Irish volunteer with the British forces who had been given compassionate leave to visit his dying father in Dublin
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
with a German refugee who had been wounded fighting in a battalion made up entirely of refugees. They had been refused British naturalization, but, the ex-German reported in derision, “would officially be allowed to adopt British surnames.”
The night silence—between vast hollow thumps of V-2S somewhere far off—was incredible for a great city. Black windows everywhere, miles of black windows; British privacy seemed complete. I felt the immense strength of the city as a secret. There was a humming, protective web. It was definitely not the vehement power you felt in New York, everyone tearing along the street, visibly walking against the sky with impatient steps. There was a belt around you. The shielding, deadening effect of the darkness was subtle, but you knew the city was secretly on guard. Somewhere many minds were thinking for you. They were there. Amid many genteel ruins you counted on them. Even on that island, in that broken city open to more bombs and burning, its crowded faces steeled for the worst, you felt oddly safe. By a hair’s-breadth, not more, this island had kept itself afloat.
In Piccadilly Circus, GIs in masses were lined up to see Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis, trod on each other’s heels as they stumbled along the pleasure circuit, flicked their Zippo lighters to have a better look at the whores waiting in a great circle for the soldiers to come up to them. My own luck in the blackout was bad. In the feeble light showing the way to Laurence Olivier in Henry V, I could see that the lady was smoldering with anger and, as I guessed from her dead cold eyes, would not put herself out in the slightest. I fell down the steps into the movie, and suddenly recovered my sight. The Technicolor was dazzling; I was in the golden age. The “low” characters chattered like magpies, laughed fit to burst their wine skins over the sniggering details fit for the jabber jabber jabber of common soldiers. Olivier read Shakespeare’s heroic verse in his high ringing tenor as if he skated up to the break in every line and then skated back again. Olivier was the king of that golden time when wars were fought only in brilliant sunshine and even the lowest peasant in the ranks could share in His Majesty:
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
London that first week, everything still so violently new, unexpected, threadbare. Myra Hess, in a fur coat, playing Schubert sonatas at lunchtime in the great hall of a National Gallery without any pictures. I lifted the telephone to give a number to the billets operator. There was a smash. “Oh, dear,” said the operator. “My windows have just gone.” Silence. I went into her cubbyhole and discovered she had fainted. The sedate bald old civil servants in Whitehall still arrived in wing collar and bowler; the statues in the Royal Academy rooms at Burlington House were chipped but in place; the view from the bridge in St. James’s Park was of a perfect set of palaces. Everything was a shaking together of traditional England and wartime England—saber-mustached proud-looking Guardsmen on Sunday clanking along the Mall with their swords on their way to service; surprisingly rosy-looking children, properly fed for the first time in their lives, playing in the dull dead alleys between the warehouses jutting on the river.
The antique iron railings around the great squares had long since been removed; the squares were supposed to look more democratic without them. By spring, George Orwell was to complain in the left-wing Tribune, they were being restored in wood. Everywhere a layer of war lay between the city and its living past: smashed churches and boarded-up store windows; splintered statues of bewigged judges and ancient public men looking a rape of the past; the clinking glassy white service dishes so much favored by the English in canteens and restaurants, usually rimmed with dirt; planes continually overhead on their way to and from Germany; storage tanks of water at the corners and little electric arrows showing the way to “SHELTER“; the rows and rows of pale Regency houses, double columns facing each other before every door, invariably taken over by the officers and men I was to see week after week sitting behind desks in battle dress.
Those first freezing weeks, often waking up in the middle of the night to the hollow boom of a rocket landing its one-ton warhead somewhere in London, I went about collecting my material on the popular education movement among British soldiers and workers, with that everlasting cold damp on my skin and the sweet smell of soft coal spurting into the air from all the chimneys in London. Cold and rain, cold like an eel slithering in your clothes. I was cold all the way and all the time. I could see the English in their horrible basement dining rooms huddled around the grate at the far end of the room—a whole tribe in the cold Anglo-Saxon weald huddled around the fire, all hands clutching the life-saving cup of tea. Fumes of coal dust hung on the icy London rain. Under the itchy long woolen underwear from Macy’s with which I had armed myself cap-a-pie for the wars, the sweater and the heavy black waterproof bulging with the thick flashlight I carried in the blackout, I walked those first days in London gasping under the sweet gassy coal smell hanging in a bilious low sky, from time to time taking refuge in one of the snack bars over the omnipresent cracked white cup of tea.
The billets in Great Cumberland Place provided for visiting Americans were the splintered, partitioned remains of what must once have been a great town house. The houses around it were mostly intact, though they were soon, in one morning, to lose all their windows. Looking away from Marble Arch and Oxford Street, the view toward Bryanston Square was tranquil, still private, sweetly old. I went to bed every night in a great bleak shell of a room, crudely whitewashed, empty except for a few army cots. The house gave off the steady suggestion that a great mailed fist had somehow gone through it and that the house had slowly shifted within itself to this blow. Little rooms had all been cut out of big rooms, were divided by cardboard partitions in which archways had been cut to lead to other rooms. The once-splendid hall had a tessellated floor in white and black that was streaked with plaster. Open wiring flew in all directions.
The manageress, Mrs. Armitage, was a brisk marvelously fresh-colored Virginia redhead married to an English officer home on compassionate leave to save the family business; her view of the “condition-of-England question” was somewhat to the right of Mr. Gradgrind’s. Despite her professional heartiness, she was astonished by my interest in the opinions of “upstarts” and “the great unwashed.” Dolts from the Ministry of Works had let an open sack of plaster dribble all over the once-beautiful black-and-white floor. It was only the appearance of an occasional transport officer, arriving with car and bright-cheeked chauffeur from the Woman’s Army Auxiliary Corps to escort me to some camp outside of London for a “look-see,” that gave her any respect for what I was doing.
The evacuation of so many women and children from the slums—the East End was a favorite target of the Luftwaffe—exposed the poor and the middle class to each other as nothing in British history had ever done. “This war took the cover off.” To think that it needed a Nazi bomb to show the English to each other! The “better sort” discovered to their horror that children scratched with head lice, had skin diseases, wet their beds, shit on the floor, that their shoes lacked soles. Many fine houses in London stood empty while homeless thousands sought a night’s refuge in the subways. But in country towns and villages forced to accept “hordes” from London—for an interval—there was revealed an extent of human damage that shocked the reluctant hosts as much as the dirt and proliferating skin diseases outraged them.
On a tour with O.W.I. personnel of the worst-hit parts of London, the chauffeur didn’t want to stop in Whitechapel. There wasn’t much to see there, only “lower-class dwellings.” The bombing of the East End was savage and terrible. In one section not blitzed, the street was lined on both sides with alley houses so dark, small, and leveled together in a brown anonymous mass that I almost wept on seeing the street itself half filled, every ten yards, with shelters that took up whatever space was left. Tyne Place East—a dirtier, grimier East Side all thrown together by the bombings. The street corners scooped out by the bombing now held storage tanks of water. The houseless streets made a dead heap. Yet Liverpool Street Station was murkily beautiful in the late afternoon with its old glass roof half destroyed. The light fiercely reflected the hurrying crowds, the tea wagons, the dirt.
England had never recovered from its industrial revolution. Along the docks everything was as dark and grimy as in the first days. Iron bridges overhead between the solid tiers of warehouses, high stone walls, cobbled passageways along which ran beautiful children red-cheeked in the cold. Would they become these men with working-class caps and scarves and yellow teeth who worked in that maze of shadows?
England was a social battleground that stayed a social battleground. The English liked class differences. They thrived on the social drama. The German exile in the British Museum had documented his case from classic horrors carefully listed by English investigators. The “drama of English society” was made up of unbelievable extremes and stolid injustices that for centuries had inflamed, amused, galvanized English writers:
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
But it finally occurred to some comfortable people—looking at the spindly, dirty bodies of the “lower classes,” listening to voices that often seemed to them “positively the voices of animals,” watching “feeding habits” that made them retch—that “the nation was most seriously weakened” by so many damaged people. The war might be lost on the playing fields of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow.
Nowhere else in the Western world would the revelation of what one’s own people looked like have come as such a shock. But some English still did not regard other English as people at all. My super-English landlady from Virginia was not more Tory than her husband, a major embittered by the “Labour Johnnies” who were promising the workers “a better England” after the war. “This war is a revolution, is it? Not where we sit it isn’t!” He was embittered by the possible collapse of the family business that had procured him his few weeks of compassionate leave. They had me to tea one Sunday at their “little place in the country,” and all through tea he stared at me with a haughtiness made ridiculous by the unsuccessful Kitchener mustache trailing around his mouth to his chin. The role-playing was intense, sometimes zany in the phrases that rolled round and round the room and bounced off the walls with the ringing sounds of self-satisfaction. Mrs. Armitage found it “totally unbelievable” that anyone in Britain should have any criticism of the “P.M.” She sometimes said “Winston” not as the subway sleepers did but with the smile of someone in his set. She knew all his sayings by heart and, with a scream of laughter, reported “Winston” saying, “I don’t take the view myself that we were a nation of slum dwellers before the war.” “Of course,” she added, “it’s all been a bit of a bore since 1940.” She still wore the large dinner ring in which she had in 1940 secreted a pill for use on herself, her mother, and her dog if the Germans invaded.
How sparklingly she chattered on about the great days of the blitz, her pride and happiness that Americans were doing so much for the “common cause.” She talked, as I discovered many English talked, for the pleasure of talking, making beautiful English sounds, keeping open the rippling fluent surface of well-practiced English interchange. The room was suddenly made up of sharp voices bright and shiny as the gleams from the silver tea service, the chintz cushions of the sofa, the vivid print my hostess wore, the shrill double ring of the telephone, and the genteel little screams of laughter with which she addressed the telephone. At one point, all these bright noises and colors became too much for me and I asked if I could smoke. “Certainly not!” the major said, in a parade-ground voice. “Why, Geoffrey!” his wife said. “Joke, my dear fellow, joke!” roared the major. He offered strong drink. “Thank God for the booze,” he said. “If Winston didn’t drink himself to bed every afternoon for a badly needed rest, we’d all be lost.” His wife, happy that we were getting on so well, went on chatting as her social duty. There was a picture on the wall of an Indian maiden. “Pocahontas,” she said, smiling. Descendants of Pocahontas turned up at every meeting of the English-Speaking Union. She was indeed one herself, she gravely informed me.
Listening to my newfound English acquaintances in government offices go on and on in syllables as meticulously accented as verse, in voices authoritative, correctly pointed, vaguely meant to subdue, I thought of how grumpily sluggish and undistinguished most American voices were. Here, by contrast, was a race of talkers confidently moving over a repertoire of familiar sounds to cajole, persuade, snub, charm, command. I could positively hear them using their voices at you.
Even the many upper-class stammerers I met among government officials and writers—people confidently directing the flow of English opinion—did not seem in the least impeded by their twitches, repetitions, mumblings, and nervous pauses. They just went on, even in public meeting, as if everyone in the audience knew what it was like to stammer. Might there be a bit of distinction to it?
I was afraid for stammerers and filled in for them every inch of the way. Attending a meeting of education officers at the War Office where W. E. Williams, director of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, was explaining and justifying the obligatory discussion of social issues as part of every soldier’s regular training, I was amazed by the ease with which the officers around me accepted Williams’s horribly slow but professionally genial recital of the “social crisis” facing England. He stammered his way through with a smile. Williams’s accent and appearance made entirely cozy his view of the “crisis” as a “communications problem.” He was a tall, lean, benevolent-looking, vaguely literary figure from Penguin Books and the British adult-education movement who had been chosen by the War Office as an expert with a calming influence when it was decided to “go left with the troops.” There had been a near mutiny after Dunkirk. Williams, a mild Socialist, was left enough to be concerned but sound. He warned the officers that the problem was still one of morale. The hidden “damage” inflicted by unemployment and lack of education could “jeopardize the unity of the British nation in wartime.” Britain could avoid becoming a second-class power by at least listening to its mass of discontent. Shaw and the Webbs had lamented “the waste of human life” in England. But Williams, one Fabian quoting still another Fabian, smilingly said, as if H. G. Wells had never said it, that life had become a race between education and catastrophe. The spirit of the troops was often truculent. Religion made little appeal, patriotism no appeal at all. There was neither the enthusiasm of youth nor the deliberate purpose of age. The war might soon be over, but it was still true, as Herbert Read had written in “To a Conscript of 1940,” that “to fight without hope is to fight without grace.”
The bitterly needed adult-education movement in England had of course begun in the lower-class unrest that followed the French Revolution. The savage neglect of the people’s education was filled in with primitive evening classes, Sunday schools, “mechanics’ institutes,” and finally the Workers Education Association. All this self-help in adult education now played the role once performed by religion, but the war had aroused a social bitterness dangerous to ignore. Even during the blitz, there had been almost a million unemployed; buildings were being constructed while the wreckage of bombed buildings was left in the streets. Dunkirk may have looked like a victory to Americans, but it was a trauma to many of the men finally taken off the beach after days in the open. Getting home without their equipment and personal effects, they felt badly used, idle, uninformed, ill-prepared for war, and despairing of a better life after the peace.
The gunners from a large Surrey unit started things. Schoolmasters and architects argued with coal miners, butchers, policemen, trade-union organizers, salesmen, solicitors, film technicians. Beginning to talk things over among themselves, they asserted and explored their long-smoldering rebelliousness more sharply in wartime than they had in the depressed thirties, when a third of the labor force was unemployed in some districts and masses of Welsh unemployed were forever straggling into London with their heartbreaking songs and pathetic banners. The discussion movement inside the Army spread to many factories, organized itself into a movement, eventually held mock parliaments in several theaters of war that spelled out the necessary rearrangement of British society. With all their principal cities under attack and the British besieged in their own homes, it was already a “people’s war.” But in some way never anticipated by J. B. Priestley, who had spurred the English on during the blitz with his BBC talks of a “new England,” the driving demand for a new order of things went beyond his mild 1940 touching up of Mrs. Miniver and The White Cliffs of Dover:
Through the fading mists there emerge the simple, kindly, humorous brave faces of the ordinary British folk—a good people, deeply religious at heart, not only when they’re kneeling in our little grey country churches but also when they’re toiling at their machines or sweating under loads in the threatened dockyards.
Already the future historians are fastening their gaze upon us, seeing us all in that clear and searching light of the great moments of history.
What we’re all struggling and battling for. Not for some regrouping on the chessboard of money and power politics; but for new and better homes—real homes—a decent chance at last—a new life. And every woman should remember that—keep the promise locked in her heart—demand that the promise be redeemed.
These sweet sounds added to British pride and stiffened British resistance to the enemy Churchill sometimes called “the Nahsties.” But what turned many in the middle class to Labour and led to Churchill’s overthrow in the first postwar election was the recognition that the state was already the operative force in English life. Britain was brilliantly organized for wartime. The British could see it every day for themselves. The state was the direct administrator of their lives. It conscripted labor and moved it about as necessary. It trained men for the Army, sent them into battle while taking on responsibility for educating them as well. It rationed food, goods, and services; fed and housed thousands in bombed areas; organized civil defense. Yet many of these state activities and directives seemed to be accomplished through the agency of the people themselves—neighborhood committees, local units of the Fire Service, borough councils administering emergency housing and repairs, elected town administrators.
The state was identified with the most basic affairs of the average citizen. War was the only catalyst of social advance! To enlist the people all-out for war, you encouraged them to make demands on the state. Even George Orwell, who would never forget the murdering repression in the name of “Socialism” he had seen in Catalonia, thought that the immediate establishment of some kind of socialized economy in England might be an incentive to fight more effectively.
None of this touched the burning sense of grievance among workers in the factories and soldiers fighting abroad or still in barracks. Their sense of injustice was irrevocable, a sacrament, a pledge of common feeling. Historic bitterness and grumbling fatalism gave the working class identity to itself, its sense of having been long marked out and put down. A long historic chain stretched out over the centuries. The gentleman Socialist W. E. Williams spoke of the “danger presented to the nation” by the damage so long permitted on England’s “common folk.” Williams had refused a brigadier general’s commission so as to retain the soldiers’ confidence in a civilian. Think of that! I heard an important official in the Ministry of Education speak of his special concern with the “dull and backward” because, “being neglected, they are the greatest danger to the state.” Equality was not an English ideal to any class. I easily fell into the old passion of English Socialism, of working-class struggle and affirmation.
England arise, the long long night is over.
Out of your evil sleep of toil and sorrow,
England arise, the long long day is here.
But the workers were their own people, belonged to nobody but themselves. George Orwell, who could still be seen at the left-wing Tribune coughing over his deadly cigarettes of the strongest shag, was sharply put down to me by a Labour Party secretary in Limehouse as “not one of us.” Was Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, in Parliament for Limehouse, “one of us”? He smiled carefully. English workers could be more hidebound and exclusive than royalty. Their customs and traditions—even the rows of houses back to back—seemed dearer to some than any possible ending of the class struggle. Their separate speech, their pubs, their “low” feeding habits, their ancient bitter humor were sacred to themselves.
But this was a country in trouble and a people driven to the wall. “Browned off.” “I’ve had it, chum.” “Work and bed—might as well be dead.”
“I do hate to keep troops waiting,” said the young leftenant to another young leftenant as I arrived for my discussion meeting. Handkerchief tucked inside his sleeve, tan shirt collar positively shining, so stiffly has it been ironed, brown shoes brightly shined until they glitter yellow, shoes heavily creaking across the floor of the Nissen hut. Little blond mustache, which he lovingly pats from time to time. They have “laid on transport” for me. The car is chauffeured by a spanking-bright blond WAAC, also in stiff tan shirt and knitted tan tie, her cap jauntily set over one ear. Authority in England begins as a show of proper collar and tie. The blonde’s army skirt is stretched tight over her neat bottom, which makes a smooth picture to present to the “ranks.” They wear no collar and tie, and button their tunics to the chin.
We enter to a tremendous clatter of noisy English shoes; the sergeant’s clanging tenor voice commands the men to attention. Every soldier stiffly standing is buttoned up to his Adam’s apple. Row on row of symmetrically buttoned harsh woolly uniforms, short haircuts, hobnailed boots. Everywhere the same burly outside look, but the faces are easier and slower than American soldier faces. “Permission is given to smoke,” and, sitting with conscious ease at tables or on trunks, the men hesitantly and carefully open up on “Civvy Street”—their civilian future, to be followed by “the shape of England and the world after this war is over.”
Serious, grave, very deliberate men, they seem to talk against an unseen current. The leftenant with the little blond mustache, reading off from the Army Bureau of Current Affairs the ground rules governing every discussion period, cannot help sounding benevolent. Unlike Americans, the sensible British Army fashion is not to mix up men from different parts of the country. These men seem to know each other from way back, at least have associations in common. How quickly they seize each other’s thoughts and guess each other out. They have the look that comes when more than five years of war have been piled on top of the mad muddling and bumbling before the war. Now, as they put it in their mild English fashion, there must be “a better lookout when all this is over.”
No revolutionary abstractions here, at least not yet! “The Empire” is taken for granted, though there is no particular pride in it. They would not like to hear Comrade Orwell say, as he always does say to the indignation of his readers, that the prosperity of the English starts overseas. Unlike American soldiers, these men do not explode on schedule in order to make a point. They also think who stand and wait. They look grimly patient, stolid to the point of contempt. You simply do not put yourself forward; you do not show your hand in anything unless called upon. The silences are deep-rutted. The leftenant is their little scoutmaster and they are going to wait him out.
When they open up at last, there is a deliberateness, a heaviness. Their language is overdressed; they put forward what is gravely called here “alternatives.” Can the state do something more—nothing drastic, just “more”—for education? Every new education reform here must come down from the top. Most British children are out of school forever at fourteen, and parents don’t always mind. One corporal reports that all over England local education officials—“they are the conscience of this country!”—beg employers not to hire children at thirteen but are besieged by angry parents who need their children’s wages. The one university intellectual in the group, looking at me with a little smile, informs me that my “fellow countryman T. S. Eliot,” now the most conservative Briton since Ethelred the Unready, has objected to the school-leaving age being raised to fifteen. Eliot deplores “all that ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ nonsense.”
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of Time did ne’er unroll;
Chill penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
• • • • •
And read their history in a nation’s eyes.
Eliot later recommended that the number of university students be cut by a third. I remembered how Emerson, speaking to the Workingmen’s College in London, praised “the pathetically noble efforts of English scholars to educate their humbler brethren.” But great American writers have changed. Everything about America can be such a thorn in English flesh just now. When the first prefabricated housing arrived from American factories, British authorities removed all their modern fixtures so that the many who could not get houses at all would not be too resentful. In Bristol a race riot started when American black soldiers were attacked by fellow soldiers for going out with English girls. The girls, to judge by the many scenes of grief when the black soldiers poured out of Bristol, did not seem to agree with the horror-stricken white soldiers. Even T. S. Eliot’s idealization of the English “conservative tradition” is used to prove what unfeeling bastards Americans can be. And the English, in their sly way, may well be right. But even these British soldiers, asking me questions that evening on the kind of quiz program they call a “Brains Trust”—you great big powerful Brains who have actually come up from London to talk to the likes of poor us!—never come right out and say they hate our guts for being on top and replacing them. The English always give such good reasons for everything they believe and do. Putting up a show of reasonableness is a fine art here. These soldiers couldn’t be more indifferent to the submerged majority under British rule in Africa or India; even the convinced Socialists say “natives,” “niggers,” “wogs.” But any white American may be held responsible for slavery, lynching, Jim Crow. Despite all the stuff about the Tennessee Valley Authority and New Deal social legislation America dishes out here, the exclusive movie diet of Hollywood offers a truer picture. They discuss America in vague suspicious generalizations. I said “Wisconsin” at one point in the “Brains Trust” quiz, and a soldier said with amazement that he had never heard the word pronounced before. The outcry is that their education is “paltry” and that they are not prepared for proper jobs in “Civvy Street.” The brutal ignorance of our decent “common folk” has not been relieved by this long, long war. A corporal who fought with the Eighth Army in Egypt fiercely asserts that Arabs are so backward, “they write from right to left and even think from right to left!”
The outside world is not very real to these men. At one point the leftenant explained that “Russia is a new nation, and therefore unused to statesmanship.” No one laughed but me. But talking about jobs, houses, marriage, “the four-ale bar,” they somehow speak for each other without the brassy American competitiveness. These men know each other, and not only because most of them left school at fourteen. They are a people. “L’Angleterre, c’est une île.” After almost six years of war, they have a certain look of experience shared. Yet the younger men in the Nissen hut were boys when the war began. There is a hesitation to their minds—not to the one university intellectual in the group—that makes me sad. “There must be a better lookout after all this is over.”
The largest restaurant in Britain, the largest restaurant in the world, the largest restaurant of all time, was “Willow Run,” the American Officers’ Mess in the Grosvenor Hotel ballroom on Park Lane. It served fifteen thousand meals a day. In a great circle in the center stretched two enormous counters, behind which stood dozens of meek English girls in white aprons and caps. Round and round the vast room stretched an unending line of American officers and civilian personnel with their trays. It was like eating on the floor of Madison Square Garden in the middle of a basketball game. When you had filled up and were exited into Park Lane itself, the quietness of Hyde Park was startling: “Sheep may softly graze.” Everyone in sight wore a uniform. There were Poles from their soon to be forgotten government in exile, looking brisk and irresistible to the English girls as they paraded in their black berets bearing the Polish eagle; Free French officers wearing the Cross of Lorraine on their old Maginot Line uniforms; London firemen with silver buttons; aged pensioners; American Air Force lieutenant colonels by the dozen, who had flattened the crowns of their caps and wore them negligently over one ear as if to show that they were as carefree in the air as they were on Park Lane.
Whenever a moment’s warmth surprised the English climate, GIs suddenly appeared with baseball bats and hit long lazy flies to each other. Watching our countrymen at play, I met the Roths, the most hospitable American couple in Mayfair. Their hospitality was overwhelming. Joey Roth was a short, stubby, profane, manic joker with endless borscht-circuit spritz or fluency. He was tirelessly show business and, according to him, enjoyed a perfect happiness that you had to share at the peril of your life. He was a New York radio producer “seconded,” as the English liked to say, to the Embassy as a public-relations officer. He had achieved this on the troopship taking him over by putting out a news-and-entertainment sheet that had turned his fellow soldiers cheerful and had convinced the brass that he had a genius for public relations. Now he was the only sergeant in the European Theater of Operations living with his lawfully wedded wife in a regular domicile. Susy was a darkly handsome wife with a voice capable of the most unsettling inflections; her bangs framed a face fixed in a slow social smile that told you absolutely nothing. Her voice continued to sweep over you in thrilling, throbbing special tones.
I was to become very familiar with this voice. The Roths lived all day and sometimes all night long in a whirl of friends and unending parties based on the regular flow of goodies and liquor through the U.S. Embassy. (On Oxford Street the first peaches, each carefully wrapped in cotton, were selling for three shillings apiece.) The Roths were always throwing parties. There was never a time you went up to the mews over which they lived in fashionable London that the floor was not massed with Embassy personnel, American correspondents, specialists in psychological warfare, market-research specialists in the public-opinion polls that were forever being taken of English opinion. It was difficult to talk to Joey or Susy alone, they were always so engulfed in friends eating and partying and playing The Game.
It was all like a Hollywood party of migrants to “the Coast.” You could hear their shouts from the street and up the stairs as you went up—American functionaries stopping in from the big Allied radio network in Luxembourg, from the Department of Justice, from the Office of War Information newsroom in Holborn, from the Embassy, the Satevepost and Time, from the Office of Strategic Services, the Board of Economic Warfare, the incipient United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association. The parties were generally strong in psychological-warfare specialists who wrote messages to the Germans designed to persuade them to surrender. Everyone was a specialist doing something very specific and technical for the War Effort; one specialist had to be aware of another specialist’s professional weight and importance at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe. The military had it all over everybody—the lieutenant who had been a flag secretary in the Atlantic Fleet, the captain in intelligence, the classmate who by spring would be in Czechoslovakia, the Harvard literary scholar who would “liberate Buchenwald,” the Air Force captain who had bombed Rumania. Ten points to the Ranger who had been with the Canadian commandos to Dieppe, twelve to the first man across the Rhine, far less to Harry Hopkins’s assistant in Russia.
Joey Roth joked that he earned the Purple Heart in the battle of Grosvenor Square—the Embassy and American enclave variously called Jeepside and Eisenhower Platz—but his England was a particular achievement and he boisterously shared it with you. About the English, as about Americans who had been decorated for some slight wound, Joey felt that they were somehow cleverer than other people, with more resources at their command. He once took me down to do a BBC discussion with the historian Denis Brogan. Coming back in the Embassy limousine, he kept shaking his head in admiration and disbelief at Brogan’s learning and Brogan’s Glaswegian disdain for those with a mite less. Brogan interested him only as a performer who, with a bottle of BBC’s best Scotch next to the microphone, luxuriated in a quickness of mind and range of learning that flashed like a photoelectric cell. Brogan knew more than most Americans about families divided by the Civil War, the early life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Catholic settlements on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As an Irishman from Glasgow, he was brilliant in abuse of the intellectual Establishment; red-faced, he boasted to me of having slept with more faculty wives than any other visiting lecturer to America; and he was possessed of total recall—especially on the sex lives of the New Statesman staff, the too liberal weekly he hated even more than he hated the powers that had deprived him of an Oxford chair. He had a chair at Cambridge, but he was an Oxford man, a Glasgow man, a Harvard man, and enjoyed a sense of superiority throughout the British Isles that came out as the bitterest resentment of his colleagues and as contempt for all reformers and radicals.
British academic stars had the gift of covering temperamental excess with stupendous learning and of imparting a truly impressive intellectual cockiness to their many shifts and breakdowns of opinion. A. J. P. Taylor went among the troops interpreting the news from week to week. After the war Taylor explained that Hitler’s aims were just the Kaiser’s all over again. But the names always before the public were England’s stars, not timid ineffectual professors. They represented a tradition, a civilization, not an academic limitation. They loved confronting America as guests of America, after Joey Roth on the jump seat of the limousine quoted repartee between Jascha Heifetz and Groucho Marx. “My dear chap, you people are clearly to be the new Romans … while we … we … must doubtless earn our keep as the slave tutors of your household. Or is it, as Cyril Connolly says, that we are fated to be the Middle Kingdom between you and the barbarous Slav? Or may it be that we are just the last of Europe?”
Joey had his “contacts” everywhere. I sat with him through luncheons of English movie people in Wardour Street, was sent off to settlement houses in bombed-out areas to talk to bewildered urchins about Whitman, found myself walking along the old Roman wall in York and making my way through clothing factories in Leeds because there was someone “especially interesting” for me to see. And there usually was. There were more distinct and even savagely colorful personalities in any backstage British city than at the University of Chicago. I especially relished sitting with Joey at the Hotel Connaught, where he would buy martinis at four shillings a drink for the crowd waiting to hear the BBC news at six. On the wall was a mighty picture of Victoria, Queen and Empress. Under it, framed, the statement she had made to Balfour during the darkest days of the South African war:
Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.
Victoria R. I.
The stately grandfather clock loudly beat the quarter-hours, and aged majestically inexpressive waiters, wearing tail coats and shirt fronts stained but still bulging with starch, tottered in bearing enormous teas. The fresh-faced young barmaid with a wicked grin would pass the martinis over her little counter, and as the great clock beat six we moved together to hear the news. The English sat there hardly twitching a muscle in their eyelids, just blinking a little at the news of still more delays in getting across the Rhine, the Americans shouting at the news of Patton’s sweep across northern France, Joey machine-gunning joke-joke to keep from weeping at the pride and importance of sitting in the same room with Ambassador Winant’s secretary and the P.M.’s own son-in-law.
In the Connaught, that reserve of ancient quiet pomp and power, the shrieks of Joey’s writer pals were muffled by the thick warm rugs, the Victorian grandfather clock, and the cold gaze of Victoria, Queen and Empress. You saw English officialdom under glass. Those blotchy-faced carefully combed-down mandarins usually left a cigarette burning in the far corner of their mouths. How unnecessary for an Englishman to take a cigarette out of his mouth when he talked! He talked through the smoke, the smoke lay between you and him, the smoke was a fixture like the fluted white staircases spiraling out of sight in the Connaught. Peering through the smoke, you saw expert geniality, a square rocklike face, black-frame eyeglasses with the old-fashioned nosepiece you hadn’t seen since you were a boy, hair that was longer in the back than you ever saw at home, and a great readiness to entertain discussion on any subject for the pleasure of entertaining discussion.
They talked as comfortably as they sat. They were very comfortable talkers. On the progress of the war and the future of the world, they shared with you their pleasure at being insiders. They confided in you. They lived in a world where everybody knew everybody else and where your name and place of origin were enough for an Englishman to know all about you. Once they located you on their map of the world, they laughed and talked about anything whatever as if they were sailing through the air—though in fact they heavily occupied their chairs and the fold in their black trousers kept its careful edge.
By contrast, Joey Roth seemed always to be sitting on the edge of his chair in uncertainty. Despite his violent flow of Hollywood jokes and gossip, Joey read the English as a lip-reader would. He talked to them by practicing the right things to say. Little might survive here but style, and it was English style that intimidated Joey. His whole aim as a “media specialist” and press agent for the U.S.A. was to make America lovable. So he ran around all day being funny and lovable. But somehow the English language in an official English mouth, pressing expertly now on one tone, now on another, cheerfully rejected him. No wonder that he clung to Americans in his private hours and that he remembered with whoops of joy the time when he and good old Bill Saroyan, both of them still in the Signal Corps Film and Theater Section, had written a film together in four days. Howling with laughter, each of them had taken turns dictating lines to a secretary.
In the age of Queen and Empress, the Mayfair mews where the Roths lived had been occupied by horses, carriages, a coachman; in the early spring of 1945, you went through a door that had once led into a courtyard, into three small rooms that had once been the butler’s and the upstairs maids’, and suddenly you were plunged into the middle of Larchmont. The expensive American domesticity was overpowering. Three thousand miles from home, the apartment was a love nest still deep in wedding presents, food, booze, a print of Picasso’s “Minotaur,” copies of The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and the latest Modern Library and New Directions books.
The Roths drowned you in hospitality. They somehow imprisoned themselves in so much party-giving. I never saw the Roths together except in a group, and the group replenished itself at such a rate that you could not make out exactly who was there. Prompting, pushing, serving, joking in the ooze and sweat of the great American party (“Fuck it, no!” he would protest when he saw someone trying to steal out at three in the morning), Joey had the look of a traffic cop out of his depth. On the one hand it was all so familiar, cozy, expected: New Yorkers in London argued fiercely whether Russia was or was not a degenerated workers’ state; benign Satevepost correspondents described in equal detail the character of General Patton and their troubles with their wives; a sparkling Radcliffe girl who felt lost in the O.W.I. newsroom recited George Herbert to me with emotion. There would be a great feeling of release and undress. As Eisenhower liked to say when he touched back in London, we were “home.”
On the other hand, why were the Roths never alone? Why, even at their parties, did they never seem to talk to each other? Once, very drunk and somehow inflamed by the mob he was usually patting, kissing, relentlessly joking with, gag after gag, Joey astonished me by cornering me in the kitchen. “C’mon and talk to me for a while. Or go in and talk to Susy for a while. Maybe you can take a message to the lady? I’m drunk and I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m getting pretty tired of living in a crowd all the time.… Christ … this place doesn’t feel like my own.” He grinned. “And it sure isn’t.” “Why don’t you chase us out?” He gave me a long, pitying look. “Don’t you know?” he said solemnly. “Practically everyone else does. It’s Susy. She’s over me all the time. I can’t stand it, I tell you. It’s no joke when someone loves you more than you love them.” Difficult as his situation appeared to be, he seemed proud of it. There was a faint smile. I thought of Gatsby saying about his house, “I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Interesting people.”
I waited for Joey to say something more. He seemed disgruntled by his confession. It seemed vaguely irrelevant. From a corner his wife looked coolly on, her bangs like a visor from under which she stared without expression at the pack of sweating Americans. I was to see her in Paris sitting at a bar with the songwriter who became her future husband. Poor old liar Joey.
I went back to my terrible room in the American billets in Great Cumberland Place. It was very late, but there was a light in the office, and under the light was a large handsome dark-haired girl who seemed to be angrily writing a V-letter. I knew nothing about her. At times she seemed to be a girl I had seen in the officers’ mess, where she would always appear as a fourth at table—a silent, large, very dark girl, her largeness somehow made up of silence.
There are strangers who keep reappearing in your life. In all the months I encountered this silently angry girl in the American quarter—Duke Street, Green Street, Grosvenor Square—I had the same sensation of having seen her before, no doubt in some other life. I was never sure who she was and that I was not confusing her with someone else. Her extraordinarily dark eyes, her gleaming blue-black hair, the orange coloring that flashed up like the end of brightness out of her “Spanish” face—all reminded me of someone. Yet now that I was always seeing her in some American office at night writing away desperately fast at what seemed to be an unfinishable letter, she sat there with her head bowed and turned away. Even when she was making a deadly fourth at “Willow Run,” while everyone else at table was chatting away, even when she was sitting so near that your knees could touch, even when you stared hungrily at that face flaming with shyness and a body on a grand scale in a silk print that openly pressed and folded her like a luxurious Titian, you found yourself trapped in her absolute silence. I would stare and stare at her, as if to locate her somewhere in space. The nearer you got and the deeper you looked, the more that ancient sullen silence came between you. I knew, even when I caught my breath in what came off her as prodigious sexual warmth, that there would never be anything else for me. I would never get past that silence.
But how extraordinary it was that I was always running into her at “Willow Run” and along all those streets in bon-ton Mayfair where the American propaganda, opinion research, and propaganda services congregated, and usually in some corner of a deserted office typing away desperately and fast on endless sheets of V-letters, tearing the letters out of the typewriter as fast as she put them in, beating away at the letter as if only the big office machine would get her message over fast enough. Watching that girl typing away late at night in every office she could get into, I thought of how often I had run into the office near Green Park to cable Natasha for the hell of it, just to write her name and our old address across the ocean. O love, guilt, nostalgia, envy, armed with airplanes, walkie-talkies, cablegrams, and secretaries, like the American news executive in Temple Bar who dictated his letters to his wife to his live-in secretary. O Americans at the peak, dashing in and out of airplanes, mounting the skies with that hangdog look of expectancy one never saw in carefully composed English faces. It all came down in the end to one American girl sneaking into the office when the day was done to look for a typewriter, and, at home behind the machine, driving it like a racing car that sputtered with sparks, trying to say the word, that one word, that would make everything right again.
By March, only by March, when the freezing rainy cold lifted, British and American forces crossed the Rhine, “THE END OF THE WAR IS IN SIGHT.” Walking down to Oxford Street for breakfast one morning, I rose into the air and every window on both sides of me broke in one glittering convulsion. A V-2 had just burst into Hyde Park. By afternoon a long queue was waiting outside a tea shop that had been hit but was still doing business. “Their way of showing sympathy, I suppose,” Mrs. Armitage, the manageress, commented in a dry offhand manner to conceal her blazing pride in the English.
Always the queue, the crowd, the friendly spontaneous group made possible for an hour by war and its inflictions. I ate in a London community kitchen after a discussion group in an army hospital. Ambulatory patients wore horrible blue suits and red ties and, sitting alongside men groaning in bed, asked me questions about America. The American-born brigadier in charge of the hospital, hearty chap, walked in for a minute to welcome me, crisply announced, “It is a well-known fact that Negroes’ minds stop working at fifteen, just ask this gentleman here,” and vanished. A junior officer appealed to the men to “rally around” to the current “demob” scheme. Peace seemed to be in the air. “Amazing how we can help each other if we but try.” Even the left-winger catalyst may be “quite a valuable ally.” The patients were subdued and in their blue suits and red ties (why ties in a hospital, for God’s sakes) looked like convicts out for an airing.
As usual, the children playing in the cobbled alleys outside the community kitchen looked rosy, beautiful, well fed. The drawn dusty Londoners at long tables up and down the room, chewing on mushy meat pie and rhubarb pie, showed faces arranged in vague docile gratitude. They looked as so many older people in London now looked: wasted, cut off, and accepting it. Before the war many of them must have felt emptied like this, but they wouldn’t have shown it in this crowd. Stiff, proper, so humble-looking. Would those shining children turn into these round-backed, white-faced adults with the uniform bad teeth and beseeching black wire spectacles?
By April there was a light in the pissy English heavens, GIs were playing softball in Hyde Park every Sunday now, and Sunday evenings there were crowds singing hymns. Michaelmas daisies began to sprout in the ashy soil of bombed-out houses. Posters showing this and labeled “RENASCENCE” emerged all over London. With a number of journalists and roving bureaucrats, I now shared atop a circular, highly modish apartment house in Knightsbridge a penthouse that seemed devoted entirely to hearty sex. Since I was always traveling, I was assigned the couch in the living room. The room was vast but not private. It had great French windows opening onto a balcony, and looked across a sea of twisted chimney pots to where the candy stripes of Westminster Cathedral stood out on the horizon like Turkish delight.
I moved in the week F.D.R. died. I awoke one morning to hear hymns from the radio in the kitchen and a woman screaming. In the midst of it all, the telephone in the hall was ringing with the demanding English double ring—yip-yip! yip-yip! I waited for it to stop, it didn’t, and as I went in to answer it, a girl in her underwear ran past me and fled into a bathroom, with a diminutive Midwest professor of history, always called “the professor,” hot after her. I picked up the receiver but could not hear a word, for the professor was hammering on the door and the girl was screaming back at him in a high cold cockney voice. “Enough!” she shouted. “That’s enough, I tell you—! You’re wacky, you bahstid, you are!” The professor still had a Band-Aid down his nose where one of his Piccadilly regulars had bitten him the night before, and the swelling veins in his fat round neck were smudged with lipstick marks; he leaned against the door, cooing to the girl in a soft drunken voice. I felt nothing but a stupefied anger at other people’s passions. The war had emptied me.
On the telephone table in the hall were our tattered cut-up ration books. The hall, like the living room in which I slept, was lined with Balinese nudes and in my morning emptiness and bitterness, their breasts looked sorrowful and ill-used. On the wall someone had put a picture, cut out of Time, showing a Negro woman weeping and clutching her belly as the gun carriage carrying F.D.R.’s body passed down Pennsylvania Avenue. We had been orphaned without a moment’s warning. The indomitable English telephone began its yip-yip! yip-yip! again. I seemed unable to answer it, and there came into my mind a photograph in the window of Jack Dempsey’s bar and restaurant on Broadway. It showed Dempsey winning the heavyweight championship from Jess Willard in 1919. The ring was in the open, and the enormous Jess Willard looked as if he were being cut down with an ax. The young Dempsey, in a close haircut and with an exuberant scowl on his face, was circling the big stupid Willard at his pleasure and beating him to a pulp. There was blood on Willard’s face and on Willard’s arms, and he just stood there, splintered and gashed, like a tree waiting to be knocked down.
I had an appointment that afternoon at Faber & Faber with T. S. Eliot. At Marble Arch an anarchist was giving out “Peace Now!” leaflets by Herbert Read and Dr. Alex Comfort. A zany black with an American Indian feathered headdress was prancing up and down as he offered the crowd around his soapbox a parody of a BBC news broadcast. An unfrocked Anglican minister from Durham was preaching a brave Victorian rationalism based on the system of Herbert Spencer. A young man thundered in behalf of some old believers called the British Socialist Party, and, sputtering with anger, denounced the Labour Party’s criminal sellout to the Tories.
Eliot received me with kindly vagueness. His office wall was surprisingly jammed with Harvard photographs and mementos, and so long as the conversation touched on Harvard friends, it kept flickering back to life. In his first years in England, Eliot had taught workers’ evening classes for the London County Council, but such gestures were far behind him. For many years he had had to adjust his delicate and easily ravaged personality to his fame, and he wore the special face he put on in public. He might be the bishop of modern poetry, the lawgiver who had dominated the classrooms for a generation. But before me was a man easily cornered and deathly afraid of being cornered. Tall, bent, impenetrably courteous, his voice sepulchral and quivering, he seemed to be listening to every vibration in the air. The antennae he put out were like the slippage in his poems, fragment to fragment of memory, terror, and confrontation. He was a publisher sitting in his office deep in the city and his fingertips were clasped together in a gesture of listless meditation. But that altogether fastidious figure with a nose that ended in a delicate little sea shell had somehow concentrated itself into a single self-protective gesture.
He was an institution capable of great suffering. He was also a Yankee humorist, skilled in playing many parts between America and Europe. How mischievously he fitted into his English décor—he was a subtler international type than those chaste Jamesian heroes Eliot had been among the first to recognize as comic masks. Looking at Eliot, in his lounge suit, carefully constructing a personality for the public gaze, it seemed to me that James had imagined the role, Eliot now lived it. How far the Yankee imagination ranged in time as well as space—how easily an American took up any role on the English stage. Benjamin Franklin playing a rustic sage had nothing on this poker player from Missouri. America was right in that room and would never leave it. The low coffee table was piled high with Partisan Review, Poetry, Accent, little magazines from Iowa City, Berkeley, Madison. At one point, Roosevelt having just died, Eliot looked at me with a smile: “By the way, what’s this Truman like?” “You ought to know, he comes from Missouri.” Eliot laughed and recited an ancient ditty about a politician: “He would make a good mayor of St. Louis in a bad year.”
That Anglicized voice had not quite completed its journey out and was capable of delicious impersonations. The tones of his voice were as expertly placed as they were in his poems; he painted pictures in my mind as he talked. The composition that he made, voice and gesture and tone, fingertips sagely pressed together, was proof to himself of his discipline. As always, I was awed by his expressive power. There was the too sepulchral, yet shaky voice in which you positively heard the gravedigger’s shovel emptying its last clod upon the coffin—Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate! And there was the voice I had always heard in his poetry, the voice that rose and fell with that slow-dying wide-spaced ecstasy of apprehension and regret. It was a voice with immense vibrations, shivered within itself to the memory of a bird call, a rosebush, a staircase. So many different ages of the mind followed each other on the slow hovering wheel that turned virtually without movement and without sound. And each age was a haunted image that left unimpaired and resistant the stone on which it had been sharpened. Eliot had saved himself, but just barely. The ravaged figure sat on the sea wall with one foot dangling above the water, wondering as always if he should go in. But, careful or not, he had made those exquisitely desperate cadences in which I had found the language of my heart. What did I care if he was now more medieval than the Pope? What did it matter that this same clerical Tory was a publisher who had just turned down George Orwell’s Animal Farm so as not to offend our Russian ally? He impersonated a flight from emotion that could fool no one who read two lines of his verse.
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
He had saved himself, just barely. He had saved himself for the rest of us.
It was hot, blazing summer in London. “Double daylight time” kept the streets awash with daylight until late in the evening. We were at the rim of the world. It was the summer of our deliverance. Hitler had come and gone.
4,000,000 DEATHS AT AUSCHWITZ
The crematoria had a total capacity of 5,500,000 during the time they functioned. The Parliamentary commission, which had previously investigated conditions at Maidanek, Treblinka and other annihilation camps, describes Auschwitz as the worst in its experience.
Theses were published on the experiments performed on human beings.
Seven tons of women’s hair were found ready for despatch to Germany. Human teeth, from which gold fillings had been extracted, were piled several feet high. 100,000 children’s suits of clothes.
Late one Friday afternoon near the end of the war, I was waiting out the rain in the entrance to a music store. A radio was playing into the street and, standing there, I heard the first Sabbath service from Belsen. In April a British detachment had stumbled on Belsen by accident, had come upon forty thousand sick, starving, and dying prisoners. Over ten thousand corpses were stacked in piles. Belsen was the first Nazi camp to be exposed to the world, and the London Times correspondent began his dispatch: “It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.” Now I heard the liberated Jewish prisoners in Belsen say the Shema—“Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.” Weeping in the rain, I said it with them. For a moment I was home.
The war was over. The war would never end. The night the Parliamentary Commission brought in its report from Auschwitz, I was at a performance of The Duchess of Malfi, with Peggy Ashcroft as the Duchess. On stage the severed hands, strangulations, stabbings, shriekings were such a hideous extension of the gassings, piles of women’s hair, and wrenched-out teeth reported in the newspaper that I felt suffocated by history without end. Shaw had called Webster the laureate of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, but Shaw was a vegetarian and did not understand that cannibalism had come round again. Kill and kill and kill again!
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay’s now competent:
A long war disturb’d your mind;
Here your perfect peace is sign’d.
Of what is’t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
• • • • •
’Tis now full tide ’tween night and day;
End your groan, and come away.
The war was over. The war would never end. In the middle of July I had been flown over to Paris to talk to French professors of English about the American writing they had missed during the occupation. Liberated France was certainly different from stodgy old Britain, where in the coming weeks Prime Minister Attlee would celebrate the greatest electoral victory of democratic Socialism by saying to the cheering mass outside the Ministry of Health: “Don’t expect too much of us. We’re batting on a very sticky wicket!” France, by contrast, was in a state of revolutionary newness, had thrown off the guilt of any possible complicity with the enemy. It was the age of words, words, and more words. The revolutionary English managed to sound all thumbs and the French made everything new—in words. Everywhere you looked there were the colors, the slogans, the sacred memories of the Resistance. Ici tombait Jean Lepont, agé vingt ans, mort pour la France. “Mort pour la France”! The dead boy had bled to death right in front of the Crillon. His blood was now our blood.
Everywhere you looked there was evidence of the religious zeal the French acquired writing their own name. La France, les François et les Françaises … Le parti des fusillées! The red, white, blue of revolutionary merriment hung all over Paris in massed choruses and bands of color, shrieking “La révolution française, le renouvellement français, la patrie!” It was like hearing the Eroica for the first time. Among the French teachers I had come over to meet, there was an easiness and generosity about sharing everything at hand that I would not see again. After the first of my lectures, I shared the grassy vegetables that was all my hosts had to eat, and was solemnly presented with a cherished edition of Pascal. The heart of Paris looked like an amusement park, a great flea circus where there was nothing to buy. Emaciated-looking whores, seeming unnaturally tall, teetered by on clumsy wooden platform shoes. Les grands boulevards were lined with booths, stalls, and bazaars selling trinkets, lottery tickets, and running games of chance. Everywhere American soldiers, girls in white blouses and gaily colored peasant skirts riding bicycles. All the great public buildings were wrapped in flags. Le Grand Palais featured an exhibition, “HITLER’S CRIMES IN FRANCE,” torture instruments, pictures of the dead and dying on the ground, the ashes of Oradour. In one of the main rooms was a large expanded photograph of a corpse on the ground of a concentration camp, his skeletal arm outstretched, Christ on His cross again. As you left, a sign rose up before you:
Tons ces morts
Tous ces martyrs
Vous disent
Souvenez vous
Camus’s underground paper Combat, now in the open, every day ran the slogan “From Resistance to Revolution.” If Sisyphus was a Frenchman, he certainly put on a good show. On the eve of Bastille Day a young French “communard” drinking with Americans reported that the Americans would intervene in any French revolution and yes, destroy it with flying fortresses. Before midnight we went to a veillée des morts pour la libération held at the Arc de Triomphe. Walking down the Champs Élysées, we met some officers in a jeep and hopped a ride. Behind us was a small group of Resistance and Army veterans following our jeep to the Arc. It was fun until we got into the great crowd itself. Then our jeep and our merriment were out of place, and we slid off.
The solemnity of the thousands pouring relentlessly into the Champs Élysées at midnight was France deifying itself in secular mass. The crowd was overwhelmed and overwhelming. It was one great rite of French self-absolution. The survivors, like all the old collaborationists, were giving themselves new life by partaking of the dead. The largest possible flag, a tricolor with one side draped in black, hung down the middle of the Arc. The spotlights on it made it the fire of some ancient sacrifice. The symbolic fire sputtered red smoky lights. All down the great avenue, microphones in every tree cried, “France! France! C’est à vous reconstruire la France!” New French recruits and their girls, licking ice cream cones and petting in the privacy of the crowd, already looked too young to remember the fall of France. The top of the Arc reflected in a pearly-white light the names of Napoleon’s great victories. But the Flag was the center of all. We were worshiping Flag, bathing our souls in Flag’s liquid light. All heads turned to Flag. Flag gave forgiveness for France’s sins as only a god can. All lights were turned on Flag, all speeches made in attendance on Flag. The watchful, subdued crowd stood uneasily within the circle of its fascination. The crowd was just an accompaniment to Flag.
At midnight the veillée closed with the “Marseillaise.” Cannon went off at regular intervals.
At the American hotel in the Rue d’Astorg, thirty-two-year-old Albert Camus said to Sergeant Albert J. Guerard: “I love Faulkner because I too am a Southerner. I love the dust and the heat.” Old, near-forgotten Jules Romains, faultless in his French literary uniform of rusty dark double-breasted suit and Légion d’honneur in his buttonhole, looked up at intervals at the shining proud erotic young Camus surrounded by eager literary GIs. Léon Blum, free of Vichy anti-Semites who had tried to put him away in a Nazi concentration camp for “treason,” was pleading in Le Populaire for a “radicalism based on a respect for man. The social revolution is made necessary by the nature of capitalist development, but it will be made by man for the sake of man. What use will it be to create a new society if we allow human beings to be corrupted in the making of it?” Camus, in Combat, complained that “within ourselves we no longer know exactly where we are and what we want. Enthusiasm is going, and seriousness with it.”
Everything was being decided with words—the beautiful words of Camus, Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier. Even the C.P. posters in the subway warned in the name of our sacred dead against any halt to the purge. I went around all day in an intoxication of French rhetoric; the new books proclaimed a message of unconditional human freedom. In Camus’s L’Étranger a man who was a stranger to all, a lumpish self-exile and murderer, gave a short surly account of his nasty little life, and the book was conclusive, radiant. Nothing could be more important than what a man owed his own consciousness. Hell was other people. Camus’s hero—“the only Christ of which we are worthy”—would die for this. But within his own soul he had experienced an intoxicating flight from our usual submission to others. Camus was the true stranger to our ways.
From within this cavern of the self, human consciousness seemed to escape the confines of law, love, the vanity that in 1940 had exposed its disregard for everything except bourgeois safety and comfort. The abrupt edgy wisdom of Camus’s message to his war-besotted generation was still Resist! It was the only message left me by my Socialist saints: Silone, Orwell, and now Camus. The writer had to take on the System—and the System seemed unlimited. Outside this intoxication of unlimited personal freedom, word-drunk Paris betrayed the voice of a secret embarrassed hysteria. “Politically” we were all crazies, mad as they come. The Nazis had erected a wall of absolute evil between ourselves and ourselves. The evil rose right up in front of our faces. The password was disgust. Having just barely dragged themselves off the German shit pile, my GI friends in Paris could talk of nothing but the death camps they had seen. One maddened lieutenant said his only interest in Germany was to get up in a plane and defecate over it. Another said that after seeing Dachau he could not look at the half-dressed whores parading Paris without seeing the naked corpses again.
But then, Paris. At eleven in the evening, the evening “gold-beaten out to ages,” the old blaze in my heart, I was crossing the Pont Alexandre III. The light just ahead of the bridge was still blue, shot with milky streaks. The bronze horses on the bridge went golden. It was the wine that French painters drink, the pale blue of the île-de-France. The war was really over.
The next day, walking in Europe at rest, Paris in the noon of summer, I am walking, swimming in the blazing hot afternoon, marching in joy down the Boulevard des Malesherbes toward my hotel off the Place St.-Augustin. Hot, brilliant, solitary: Paris asleep. There are just a few other crazies walking about in this heat. On both sides of me, the awnings over the closed and shuttered shops pull away from me in amazement. Behind me, a newspaper stand, streets thrusting diagonals. The kiosk reminds me of the armed post on the Mall in London camouflaged as a newspaper stand and able to turn its fire in any direction. But the war is over and it is midsummer hot, so hot that I drift down the street drunkenly at home with myself. Under an awning, behind a barred window, is a line of ocarinas, each squat in its shell of terra cotta. Though it is unbearably hot and the ocarinas are just little gooselike toy instruments, I am filled with great joy; I am so happy that I cannot tell my joy from the heat in the street and the sweat running in streams down my clothes. Somewhere off the Boulevard des Malesherbes there is the splash of a fountain.
I returned from Paris to find lying on my couch in the living room a pale little blonde in an English naval uniform with the markings of a petty officer. Even in bed she wore her stiff collar and a little black tie. The rest of her ended in a ragged pink petticoat. Her face was so thin and drained of color that she looked albino. As I stared at her hoping to get my couch back, she smiled at me very nicely and invited me to sit down. In the kitchen someone seemed to be conducting a loud whimpery monologue. The little naval person in my bed laughed. “Afraid my friend of the night has been causing quite a rumpus in your flat.” I went into the kitchen to find a large soft-looking man in the uniform of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association shakily sipping a cup of coffee and looking up in sheepish embarrassment as the Midwest professor of history yelled, “Get that floozie out of here! Get her out!” “Aw, gee. Don’t take it like that.” He started to get out of his chair, weakly fell back into it, and to our amazement burst into tears. “I feel just terrible!” he shouted. He oratorically put his hand over his heart. “I shouldna done it! I am being punished enough right here!”
The girl grinned up at me as I returned to the living room. “Keeping you out of your room, aren’t I? Afraid I’m not at all well.” She got out of bed, still grinning—“Only decent bed I’ve had for the last nine days!”—and put on her trim navy skirt and solid navy shoes. “Want me to clear out, I suppose? My friend of the night promised me a cup of tea, but he seems engaged.” In the kitchen the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association sat in an ecstasy of remorse, ignoring her. I brought her some tea. A fixed, unbending smile seemed to be the only face she could wear. Punctilious, mischievous, she had that English look of positively enjoying a stray social meeting as a battle of wits and unveiling of pretense. Who knew what this day would bring forth? She seemed increasingly delighted with the fact that I clearly did not know how to get rid of her. Wearing her navy tricorne, she lingered over her tea in elaborate slow motion, occupied her chair with crossed legs that she did not seem able to uncross, and smiled, smiled, smiled. We were having an unexpected early-morning tea together and this was the most delightful fact in the world to her.
That English gift of putting a good public face on things, getting out of a situation! At a tinkly little chamber-music concert during a bombing raid a woman next to me had cheerfully whispered when I picked up the program she had nervously dropped, “Panic averted!” I was not surprised to see my little naval person hold up her cup in winsome plea for another, and with that same cheeky, threadbare smile, say, “Thanks, love. That’s a good little love!” There was an air about her, an intactness, a way of sizing you up and eluding your own gaze, a way, above all, of protecting her own privacy—right in the middle of nowhere. She was telling stories about herself and laughing over each one. At the moment she was A.W.O.L. She had been “a little out of things, not quite myself, you know”; her husband had died in a freaky army accident crossing a makeshift bridge over the Rhine. “Drift about a lot.”
She liked to be picked up, night after night. It was like being taken to a new play. You just never knew what would happen next. Americans. So funny. Always too serious about the sex thing. She made a little face. Bloody shooting gallery is what they thought it was, and her the pigeon. Afterward they got angry at her for being so willing. Didn’t much care about it one way or the other, you know. And why was she talking to me like this? Little shrug. Didn’t know where she was now. Didn’t know where she was half the time. Floating through the time. Not much rhyme or reason to much of anything just now, was there? Just floating, love, and getting through the days and nights. So often got up in the morning, love, and didn’t know where to turn. And at the moment had nothing but the clothes she stood up in.
My English tyke. My I-don’t-care girl. It was her not caring that of course got me. She had slipped out of the race. I thought of the week at sea still ahead of me, of the large assured American girl from Public Opinion Surveys who would also be returning on the Queen Mary. I thought of haves and have-nots, ins and outs, winners and losers. I was a clown whose life was always being taken in hand by women. Why did this always happen to me? Maybe God was a woman after all. Certainly no one else ever had such power over me.
I was on line outside the army post office on Duke Street. The large handsome girl waiting behind me looked enough like the silently angry girl I had seen some nights at the billets, furiously writing away at one V-letter after another, the girl who never spoke to anybody but whose whole physical emanation crackled like a live wire as she sat there writing page after page to her unknown soldier.
It was not the same girl. I would know soon enough that the girl who took over was not the girl whose lonely passion had excited me. This girl, Louise, was measured, calm with the authority of someone who could make herself perfectly understood without words. She would never need words in order to make her wishes felt. My silent woman was powerful. Her power, as her next husband was to say in awe, was positively elemental. She communicated by signs and wonders, deep looks, by the flush that suddenly rushed up her face, by a whole switchboard of colors flashing signals from her skin, by the amazing luster of her brilliant black hair. She certainly did not need words much. She had decided to take me in hand, and she made this blazingly clear by such mental tuggings from her sumptuous body that a minute after I met her standing in front of the army post office in a London street I knew I had been definitely summoned. Like father, like son. It was as if she had put a card in my hand reading “Here I am.” The long winter was over.
I went off with Louise, not admitting how glad I was to go. It was a warm wide-open day. The war was over. Pudgy great Churchill, the savior with brandy and cigar, had stood on the balcony of the Ministry of Health and harrumphed, “When shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I say that in the long years to come not only the people of this island, but from all over the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, men will look back to what we have done.” London had put out the last of Hitler’s fires, but large bonfires were lighting on bomb sites and in the middle of the streets.
It was certainly getting very warm. The weather was hot, positively Italian. The sunlight fell evenly on every crack in the gashed and sandbagged streets. London was putting out the last of its fires, and some stubborn ember still smolders as I remember the amazing welcome in Louise’s face. That afternoon in St. James’s Park the greenness of the willows burned steadily in my eyes, the gaping water tanks at the bombed-out corners were crisp with sun. My mind was beating new wings across the water in the park. And then, in the peace-astonished city, past three torches burning at noon along the river, past the broken naked rooms where a loose toy rattled against the open kitchen pipes, we walked hand in hand. It was growing still hotter. The air drummed with the sound of Lancasters flying low over the city. Great explosions seemed to be going off somewhere very far away.
The crowd was strangely silent as it drifted slowly, aimlessly, through the park. People looked up from the penny chairs where they sat with great propriety, but slouched with weariness and occasionally smiled up from their newspapers. Even the few men in uniform who joined the crowd seemed uncertain. Fatigue lay over the hot, sun-baked park. Everywhere people were stretched out on crumpled newspapers. The grass was thick with blankets, mackintoshes, wrinkled sheets of the Daily Express and the Standard. All these bodies flung out on the ground. Everyone open to everyone else now. I had seen them sleeping on the subway platforms those winter nights, and had just seen them in the great bomb shelter and first-aid station at Walthamstow. Husbands and wives still came in every night long after the bombings were over to sleep in separate dormitories. The war had been over for weeks, but the women still put out hot-water bottles for the shock cases. Lower-class England loved being one vast community bedroom. The bodies were strewn all over the park, but kept that almighty civility.
My new friend and I sat close together, touching and not touching. Although her head was bowed, somehow turned away, the heat coming off that warm flashing face and silky summer dress put me into a dream of the summer ground. I was swimming, leaping, flying in summer again, absolutely caught by the waves from this woman’s silence.
From where we sat, I could see a man who in this sudden heat was still wearing a pullover under a rusty tweed jacket and a mackintosh over it. He was a meager, tensely controlled figure in the usual humdrum black glasses with a wire nosepiece. But as he sat on the grass with his arm around a girl, he wore his wartime shabbiness with an air. His other hand, liver-spotted, lay very near me. He should have been highly uncomfortable in all those clothes, but he did not seem to be. It was amazing what a spot of good weather could do for the English. The day was warm, everyone open to everyone else. The man in the mackintosh suddenly opened his fly, pushed up the girl’s skirt, and, still wearing his glasses, still in his mackintosh, with the mackintosh over them both like a blanket, thrust himself firmly into her. Nobody seemed surprised at the sight. In the massed noisy park people delicately passed them without a word.
A long war disturb’d your mind;
Here your perfect peace is sign’d.
• • • • • •
’Tis now full tide ’tween night and day;
End your groan, and come away.