Chapter Thirteen
In small countries the landscape is a roomful of pictures
Framed in the window of the train.
There is composition – an old mill in the centre
With a cow on one side of it and a horse on the other,
Or a manor-house, perhaps, set among elm-trees,
Or old men on a bridge, and a boy fishing.
In large countries the landscape is a wallpaper
Lining an enormous room.
It slides past the window of the train
With variation, repeated variation,
Yet no real change.
A wooded hill, a lake, a long white town,
A hill, a lake, a town, a wooded hill,
A lake, a long white town.
There is length, but never any centre
For things to cluster round.
From ‘Small Countries’, 1944 (unpublished)
IT SEEMED TO come quite suddenly, this new phase of Jan’s life, when blackness of heart rather than resolute cheerfulness was her dominant emotion. Over that summer of 1943 she changed from the powerful and frivolously confident guest in Lincoln’s bed to a much frailer woman, at the mercy of short-lived ‘highs’ and long-drawn-out ‘lows’.
She had experienced mild depression before: hints of it had appeared in her early poems, and she had even managed to project it, twelve years before, onto Mary Magdalene in her hymn ‘Unto Mary, demon-haunted’ for Songs of Praise. The refrain went:
Banish, Lord, our minds’ confusion,
Fear and fever drive away;
Down the valleys of illusion
Spread the kindly light of day.
There was a streak of depression in the family: a surviving teenage diary of Jan’s mother Eva suggests that she too experienced it, and later, in 1951, Jan’s brother Douglas suffered a depressive nervous breakdown. In Jan’s case, confusion seemed to be its overriding symptom. This poem, written in 1944, echoes her earlier hymn’s refrain:
It took me forty years on earth
To reach this sure conclusion:
There is no heaven but clarity,
No hell except confusion.
It felt, during these periods of ‘confusion’, as if her way was lost in what she called ‘the mind’s jungle’: the tangled, chaotic mass of entwining worries and fears which existed in her head where once was ‘starry, clear-headed inner fertility’. In an effort to befriend and make light of this new, recurring affliction, she gave it a nickname, ‘the Jungles’.
As the tide of the war turned in the Allies’ favour and talk of the invasion of mainland Europe began to be heard on people’s lips, Jan knew that the time was coming when she would have to make a decision about the situation which she had allowed to develop in her life. During a war, the rules were slackened: you could live in a state of suspended reality, basking in the present moment, not questioning the consequences. But at the end of a war you had to emerge again, wake up from the dream, and pick up real life where you had left it.
The subject had to be broached with Dolf. Out of their preliminary talks came an awareness, devastating for Jan’s confidence, that the relationship was not set in stone. Nothing had ever been promised: the love-affair had survived, so far, on trust alone.
Jan told Dolf that when the war ended, she would have to go back to Tony. She couldn’t simply abandon him, so that he would return from his POW camp to wifelessness. He and the children needed her: the ‘family pattern’ was the foundation of their sense of security.
But having broken this news to Dolf, she could not then expect him to be loyal to her; he had every right to look elsewhere for love if she intended to go back to her husband when the war ended. Dolf falling in love with somebody else did not bear thinking about: but she did think about it, and her love for him, her need for him and her fear of losing him became more rather than less intense.
This was a major cause of her ‘Jungles’. There was also physical exhaustion, panic at the loss of her magic touch as a writer, a sense of anti-climax after stepping down from the pinnacle of fame, and an increasingly acute feeling of missing Jamie.
As soon as she returned to New York from the Los Angeles summer she became physically ill, with gastritis. Her physical and mental states were from now on closely linked. When she was depressed she couldn’t keep food down, or sleep, and this made her feel worse. ‘Maybe it’s not good for two human beings to get so happy in one another’s company,’ she wrote to Dolf from her bed, ‘when they are doomed to live in separate cages of skin and flesh which may be separated by circumstances at any moment and for oh! so long. In one way, though, I feel closer to you here than I did in that farcical pseudo-proximity without privacy in California. At least I am living in the home we shared together, among furniture & books on which our eyes have rested.’
Her doctor, Max Schurr (who had been Sigmund Freud’s personal physician), advised her to cancel her October 1943 lecture tour. ‘I’m horribly disappointed,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘but I can’t go trailing about the country in this state, never knowing whether I’m going to throw up into the next microphone or otherwise disgrace myself in front of The Ladies.’ The cancellation was a relief and brought about a gradual physical recovery, so she did not have to cancel her sixteenth appearance on Information, Please!
I am getting stronger physically [she wrote a month later], but it appears that with every increase of strength comes an increase of awareness & therefore of sadness. I seem to have no heart for anything except you. Everything else is empty and senseless. This is all WRONG, & it’s sort of undignified for any human being to become so dependent on another human being for mental & spiritual sustenance. But I don’t even care about that. The hell with dignity. I only want to be in your arms – No, that’s not true. If it were, I should say the hell with my duty to Tony & my compunction about the children’s peace of mind & my value as Allied propaganda, & just leap on a train & come to you. But that would be going AWOL – and you know that we can’t do that, whether we are official or unofficial soldiers. There are some things that one could not DO, if one wanted to retain one’s self-respect & peace of mind for ever afterwards. But I just want you to know how I wish I could see the slightest chance of our spending our future lives together.
Dolf had been promoted to the rank of corporal, and was now Classification Clerk at Inglewood, California. ‘I am still having fun,’ he wrote to Jan, ‘or at least some part of me is having fun, while the rest is numb and dead. I was so disappointed that I couldn’t get my call through to you, but the lines were jammed, i.e. the waiting time was 8–10 hours, so I had placed the call too late. Furthermore, hearing your voice on Inf. Please stirred so many things up in me that I felt a little weak anyway, and when it didn’t come off I felt something like “a cowardly relief”.’
He had found, among ‘the buddies’, a confidant whom he told about his love affair with an English married woman. Jan’s reaction to this information revealed how sensitive she still was about her reasons for coming to the United States in 1940: ‘I know it sounds more romantic and simple, the way you put it to him, but don’t you see that it isn’t fair on me to imply that I left GB just at that crucial moment simply and solely to be with you? I didn’t, as you know: if the children hadn’t been coming I’d just have had to stick it out and mend my heart with Scotch tape or something. So please revise that version before I come – otherwise, I promise you, I shall get hold of him and do it myself.’
For Mrs Miniver, and for Jan in her early marriage, privacy and free time had been two of the most cherished privileges. In ‘Mrs Miniver and the New Car’ she had quoted the Chinese proverb, ‘To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal.’ But now, in late 1943, she dreaded solitude, and feared the emptiness of being ‘at leisure’. The woman who had once made sure there was a permanent nannie between herself and her younger children now dreaded them going back to boarding school. This was another symptom of her depression. If there was nobody in the apartment with her, she was paralysed with loneliness. Pauly came and spent the night with her often, to keep her company: they were brought together by both missing Dolf. ‘Ich weiss wie tief dankbar ich sein muss,’ Pauly wrote to Dolf in 1943, ‘und ich darf bestimmt nicht klagen, aber ich bin oft so schrecklich allein.’ (She ended the letter, ‘Wirst Du nie fotografiert von den Buddies?’)1 But Pauly now had a job as a paid ‘lady companion’ to a wealthy American lesbian, Miss Frank, and had to travel with her wherever she went. Jan’s secretary Anne Curtis Brown had left, to get married.
‘I miss Anne dreadfully,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 22 October 1943.
It was lovely to feel that she would be turning up every morning – moody as the devil, but human. The early mornings are the worst. Gracie comes at 10.30. Pauly (when she sleeps here) leaves at 8.30. Those two hours, especially after a bad night, are purgatory. I don’t know what we can do, darling, except wish on our star and wait. The Russian (& other) news is marvellous, & that’s what we ought to fix our minds on. Hell, when people are being killed all over the world, & nine lovers & sweethearts out of ten are being separated, the fate of two scraps of humanity like us ought to seem insignificant. But oh God! how it hurts. If everybody – I mean all lovers – who are torn apart like this are feeling as we do, the world seems too small to carry such a load of exquisite misery. I know we have no right to think of ourselves as exceptions – it’s only that most of them can at least look forward to some focal point in the future when they can take up their lives together again, whereas we – but what’s the use of going into all that again every time I write …
This was an eighteen-page letter, and it ended: ‘Darling, I’ve just made myself a dry Martini, & I’m lying on the bed drinking it. As it penetrates down to my fingertips & up to my braincells, I find I can almost imagine us happy again one day, & falling asleep in each other’s arms with nothing more formidable than an alarm-clock for the next morning. Sweet, foolish, heavenly dream … I’ll cling to it while I can.’
Pauly, when she stayed with Jan, went downstairs each morning to collect the mail. If there was a letter from Dolf, she woke Jan; if there wasn’t, she let her sleep on. Jan read the letters aloud, leaving out the private bits and the bits which might worry Pauly. On 23 October she had to leave nearly everything out. ‘There is a chance that I might be sent overseas,’ Dolf had written.
‘Please don’t even mention the overseas idea to me at present,’ she wrote back. ‘I am not strong enough to stand it.’ Her thoughts were ‘going round and round like chipmunks in a cage’ – and the only way to regain any peace of mind, she realized, was to countermand the cancellation of the second half of the autumn lecture tour. At Jan’s request, Clark Getts had arranged for her to be in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving, after giving four lectures in Illinois, two in Texas, two in Oklahoma, two in Washington state, and three in northern California. ‘Darling, I am on my way to you,’ she wrote on 7 November, ‘travelling in a slow and rather cold train through an illimitable waste of snowy prairie. I am sitting with a nice Pittsburgh housewife who is on her way to Seattle to see her husband (an Army doctor) for a little while before he goes overseas. She has 3 small children at home & can’t therefore do war-work to take her mind off things. She is obviously miserable. Just one more of the millions of torn-apart and disembowelled…’
In her engagement book, the inch-deep space for Thanksgiving Day has a diagonal mark across the top left-hand corner: her secret sign. The Clark Getts Details of Engagement say: ‘We presume you have your own plans for accommodation in Los Angeles.’ She and Dolf stayed at the Biltmore, for three nights. By 2 December she was lecturing at Houston, Texas, and she would not be able to see Dolf again until his furlough, which could be months away.
Her lectures, she felt, could do with rejuvenating. She needed new material, first-hand, up-to-date information about wartime civilian life in Britain. She made an application for a two-way passage. Surely she would have priority, with the excuse of ‘collecting material for British publicity in the US.’ She dared to dream about it: and, having started to dream, she let herself go. She would see Jamie again, and small fields, and beloved London! Homesickness overwhelmed her, and she was now as set on returning to Britain as she had been on leaving four years before.
But her plan was constantly foiled. Later in December, a fibroid was found in her womb (‘apparently innocent,’ she wrote to Tony’s sister Ysenda, ‘but obstructive, so that I am absolutely crippled with pains for the four or five days when I have the curse, and have to stay in bed with my knees doubled up, feeling as though I’m giving birth to twins’). Then the British Information Service told her there was a long list of essential people trying to get to Britain, and she would have to wait some months. ‘I expected to have left by now,’ she wrote to Dolf on 2 March 1944, ‘but it seems it may be another couple of weeks at least. I feel discouraged and on edge.’ She could not get to sleep without a sleeping-pill or a drink. ‘DON’T call me “a brave girl”, sweetheart. I am not brave, & you know it. My only strength is that I do not fear death any more – only injury, and sea-sickness, and lecture audiences, and going home to a Heimat which will be stranger than any strange land.’
Then news came from England that Jamie, having injured his leg on a training exercise, was in an Army hospital with haemorrhoids. And she still had no definite date for leaving. ‘You can imagine my present state of mind,’ she wrote to Dolf on 20 March. ‘The suspense of this journey business is awful. In addition, everything else has been going wrong at once – financial worries about income tax, Getts chivvying me about lectures, and, underlying everything, my ever-present sadness at being separated from you with oh! so little hope of seeing you again till God knows when … I saw two letters from Tony in the mailbox yesterday at long last – but when I looked at them I saw that one was 7 months old, from Italy, & the other (a postcard) 5 months old from the German transit camp. Oh dear, it’s so hard to keep in touch with people when the news one gets is so stale. The postcard sounded very depressed (for him).’
In the course of the Allied liberation of Italy, some prisoners-of-war had been released to make their own hazardous way to the Allied lines. But Tony had been among the less fortunate ones who were sent on in closed cattle trucks to Germany, by way of transit camps in Central Europe. ‘You may imagine my disappointment at finding myself here,’ he had written to Jamie from Stalag VIIA in southern Germany on 8 October 1943. His postcard could not say more.
By 16 April 1944, Jan’s journey to England was definitely off. ‘Nothing can make the Home Office give any guarantee of my being able to get back here again,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘especially with things being about to pop (invasion etc.) & I simply cannot risk getting myself stranded there & the children stranded here … I feel desperately disappointed on Jamie’s behalf. For myself, I feel ghastlily disappointed at not seeing him. I feel like a snapped string, and I have now no focal point to look forward to.’
I have forgotten even the smell of happiness –
As one who has been many months at sea
Forgets the scent of grass on summer evenings.
I remember only that it was sweet, and lifted the heart.
One of these days, perhaps, there will be landfall,
And I shall smell it again, and my heart be lifted.
But for now there is nothing except the bitter salt,
Day after day after day.
While she was working on this poem, called ‘At Sea’, in the black fortnight after the final cancellation of her plans to return to England, Dolf sent her one in German he had just written, about being in a strange sun-land where there was no rain, and no sweet smell of grass in the evening. It was another of their poetic coincidences. ‘Oh, darling,’ Jan wrote back, ‘I try so hard to orientate myself away from the life which you have been the centre of for so long: I think I am making headway – and then suddenly a poem of yours strikes me right to the heart and makes me realise how absolutely “one river” we are.’
* * *
A period of ‘Schneeschmeltzen’ – the thawing of Jan’s iced-up spirit – followed in April, with the help of Dr Pardee, a neurologist with whom she sat for many hours, talking things out. He told her she was going through a kind of battle fatigue as a result of trying to deal with insoluble problems until her brain was exhausted and congested. He could not solve the problems, but he at least clarified what was happening, and this shaft of light tipped Jan in the other direction, from depression to a new kind of high – elation spiced with dottiness. She dashed off poems every day – ‘A poem a day keeps the doctor away’:
I’ll never see, where’er I roam,
A tree as lovely as a pome.
A tree is just a thing that growed –
But only man can make an ode.
She and Dolf were frank, in their letters, about their ‘randiness’. ‘When I’m in camp I don’t miss sex so much,’ Dolf wrote, ‘but as soon as I get out and especially after catching up on my sleep, it bothers me – not enough, though, to get into the gutter. What I really miss is LOVE – the whole thing, the physical and mental.’ Jan was having calcium injections and had discovered that they ‘reduced local desire in other parts of the body’. ‘This is a major discovery,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘though rather comic in a way. I never knew about it before, because it is so many years since I have been sex-starved (awful word).’
They were both aware of the possibility of the other ‘getting involved with’ somebody else. ‘Are you?’ Dolf wrote. ‘No, sweetheart, I am NOT,’ Jan replied. ‘Temptations are many & strong because I’m meeting so many fascinating people – but (a) I’m too physically tired to be very randy very often & (b) I love you too much. This is not a promise – we neither of us made a promise – but only a statement of fact.’
Dolf had every reason to fret: Jan was meeting lots of attractive, eminent men, the very fact of her affair with him proved her capable of infidelity, and she did have crushes. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t the least letch on Morris Ernst [President Roosevelt’s personal representative on missions to England],’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘I had for about 2 days, but got over it when I’d lunched with him for the 3rd time & seen his handwriting in a notebook.’ (Amateur graphology was one of the dozens of subjects which fascinated her.) She was great friends with the singer Paul Robeson, crush material even though he was married (and it was Janet, not Jan, on whom Paul Robeson turned his seductive charms). Dolf hardly met any women from one year’s end to the next, but Jan still felt jealous. She used the expression ‘a blonde’ to describe the kind of woman Dolf might be tempted go to bed with: someone of great superficial physical attraction, but not much brain. It was a cunningly derogatory term, designed to make Dolf feel ashamed if he did succumb to such a person’s charms. It became one of their private comic words; but underneath the comedy there was genuine fear on Jan’s part. When she saw ‘a blonde’ in her imagination, it was always somebody young, with bouncy hair and a bronzed West Coast complexion. Dolf was thirty, she was forty-three. Her own hair was becoming silver-flecked, and she occasionally caught sight of a double chin in a right-angled mirror. (She had recently sent Dolf a funny photograph of herself looking donnish and double-chinned in a mortarboard while being awarded an honorary degree by the University of Pennsylvania.) It was a sign of the shifting balance of power in their relationship that she felt the more insecure.
She telephoned Dolf one morning and he was short with her. He didn’t say, ‘Is that you, darling?’ but ‘Is that New York?’ Feeling sick with foreboding, she wrote to him.
The possibilities, as near as I can figure them out, are these:
1 You were desperately sleepy and early-morning-new-born-kittenish, and couldn’t rouse yourself to talk much. OR
2 You were feeling really sick, either in the stomach or in the head. OR
3 You were feeling depressed about the boringness and smallness of your job, and longing to get overseas or at any rate into something more interesting. OR
4 You weren’t alone, and therefore couldn’t speak freely. This again splits up into various possibilities, viz:
5 You were sharing a room with another GI, owing to space shortage. OR
6 You were sharing the room with a GI blonde. OR
7 You were sharing the room with Janie [a married acquaintance, in whose house Dolf sometimes spent the night on his leaves]. OR
8 You were sharing the room with somebody else, not a GI blonde, but some other, new, ‘real’ person.
She made herself face and analyse each of these possibilities in turn. It was an utterly un-‘blonde’ letter, drawing on their deeper-than-physical bond of words and candour. It was an exercise in preparing for an end with Dolf, whenever it might come. This was how she dealt with the final three possibilities:
6 I want you to know, darling, that I don’t mind in the very least. I know what you must have been going through about sex, partly because I’ve been going through it myself. I don’t want to risk getting emotionally involved with anybody, so I stick to Miss Bates. But, as you know, if it were possible for a woman to go to a convenient and hygienic brothel, or to pick up the equivalent of a GI blonde, I would do so at the drop of a hat (or should I say at the rise of a clitoris?) So that’s that. I wish circumstances were not such as to make it necessary, but seeing that they are, and seeing that you are so heavenlily, heavenlily highly sexed (thank God) – well, as I said, don’t worry.
7 I also don’t mind, sweetheart. I expected something of the kind to happen in that quarter, and I have had a feeling for some time that something has. Partly because you don’t seem to go there as often as you used to, and partly because you don’t mention her in your letters any more … Maybe you fell in love (or started to) with her and felt you oughtn’t to go there any more because of [Janie’s husband] Ted: or maybe you just both felt that electric something growing up in the air between you, and agreed that you’d better not meet. Or perhaps you both fell in love, or in lust, and you are meeting. Well, you needn’t feel badly about it, if this is so.
8 Well, that’s the worst of the possibilities, I admit, and when I thought that one out I did have a quarter of an hour of fairly acute pangs: but even that I managed to digest after a while, and get the sting out of it, by reflecting that you and I are no longer just ‘you’ and ‘I’. We have been mixed up with each other so long and so sweetly and so intimately that from now to the end of our lives we shall be part of each other: therefore I shall always share in any loveliness you have, and you will share in mine. It is only by thinking oneself into this frame of mind that one can overcome or transmute jealousy. It is not easy, but it can be done, and genuinely, if one’s love is deep enough.
Well, there, as they say, the case rests, until I hear from you. All I implore, darling heart, is that you tell me the truth. For the sake of everything we’ve been to each other in mind and body; and for the sake of Mozart and Donne and Shakespeare and Goethe and Placzek and Struther and all the other poets and musicians alive or dead; and for the sake of all the beauty that our love for each other has helped us to discern and enjoy – PLEASE write soon and truthfully.
It turned out that Dolf had simply been sharing his room with a GI from Alabama, ‘a lazy son-of-a-bitch who wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom while I was talking (any Viennese would have).’ ‘Oh, blessed, blessed possibility five!’ wrote Jan. ‘How I love him, the fat slob. I could kiss him on his solid southern arse.’
* * *
In her new state of elation-after-depression, Jan turned her apartment at 214 Central Park South into a busy haven of helpers, friends, children and eccentric pets. ‘If you knew what life has been like for the last 3 weeks,’ she wrote to Dolf on 2 August. ‘I’ve only been able to get scrappy help so I’ve been cooking and cleaning and looking after Robert’s livestock (1 snake, 1 baby alligator, 2 turtles & 3 salamanders), & training Margie (the new secretary), and giving the baby its bottle & changing its diapers & I don’t know WHAT all. Oh, I forgot, you don’t know about the baby. She is called Barbara & is COAL black & very sweet. She belongs to the temporary maid (Rose) whom I captured in Harlem 2 weeks ago when I went up & raided the Slave Coast in despair. It’s simply heavenly having a baby around again…’
Jan could say deliberately provocative things like ‘raided the Slave Coast’ because she had a genuine love of black people. She craved their company. She and her black maids had coffee round the table each morning (not at all the done thing in 1940s New York), and this was not a mere patronizing gesture. There was real unselfconscious friendship. She would have despised the ‘politically correct’ people of half a century later who refused to ask for ‘black’ coffee but never had black friends in the same way as they had white friends.
Carl Sandberg, Jan and Paul Robeson at a gala dinner
Jan made two new ‘bosom friends’ in the spring of 1944: one was the black actor Canada Lee, whom she had met while selling war bonds. ‘He is 37, very dark skin, and a swivel eye (from having been badly hit when he had to give up prize-fighting). He has a son called Carl, even blacker, a brother called “Lovey”, who is a postman; a divine old uncle called Mr Gaddesden (Gaddy) who is from South C’lina & fries chicken like a dream; & a host of friends, some Negro, some white.’ The other was Bennes Mardenn, aged twenty-eight, a friend of a friend of Janet’s, who was a struggling actor working as an elevator attendant. ‘Through him we’ve got to know a whole raft of struggling actors, musicians & dancers, mostly Jewish of Russian background but not in the least ghetto-ish, so don’t start snorting, you old Viennese snob … These two new worlds converge in our apartment, and we sit up playing the mandolin, guitar, concertina, etc. & talking & drinking beer, wine & Coca-Cola till anything between 2 & 5 every morning. It is the kind of “student” life which I never had, and it’s heaven compared with the depression & gloom I was in all last winter & spring. The only thing lacking is you, playing the piano in the jam session & being host with the wine & so on.’
Staying with Bev Robinson and his wife Marian in Canada in late August, she listed to Dolf the skills she had acquired in the last few weeks, many of them picked up at Robert’s summer camp, Camp Kieve in Maine, which she visited on the way: 1 using a long-hafted woodman’s axe, 2 using a scythe, 3 playing the guitar, 4 using a soldering iron, 5 making knotted string belts in different patterns, 6 whittling, 7 graphology, 8 cooking, 9 Yiddish, 10 Russian, 11 rifle-shooting.
I did (11) brilliantly at Rob’s camp: he practically embraced me in front of the councillors. I was able to put over a WHALE of a talk against racial intolerance at supper, & they LISTENED, which I knew damn well they wouldn’t have on the strength of any mere literary achievements. And later, sitting on the stoop of the council hall, I took a live snake out of the Nature Room & sat with it coiled round my wrist & fingers while I pursued the same line of talk. God, how they need it – at least half of the boys are from Baltimore & points south, & they stink on the Negro problem, & even on anti-Semitism. I had quite a run-in with one brat in the workshop on the same subject. Luckily I was, at that time, helping him to use a soldering iron, which was the best possible position to be in. I had a primeval longing to shove the white-hot soldering iron up his fat little Arsch …
Dolf’s heart sank slightly when he read letters like these. When he first heard that she was feeling happier, he wrote: ‘This was really the greatest Sunday gift you could send me, Kleines.’ But he now feared that she could only escape from ‘the Jungles’ by throwing herself into this almost manic over-activity. He would have been more convinced of her recovery if she had taken up one new skill, rather than eleven. And as for all the shooting, snake-wielding and shoving things up arses – he detected suppressed rage which might turn dangerous if her mood changed.
She crawled under the foundation posts of the house in Canada, shot a porcupine, then skinned and dissected it. ‘I got out its heart, lungs, stomachs, 9 feet of intestines – I measured them – liver, kidneys, spleen & vagina; then I made the meat into a stew with onions & we all ate it for dinner; then I boiled down the head & four paws to get their skeletons to keep for Robert. I’m going to make the teeth & claws into a bracelet. A perfectly glorious day.’
This behaviour was Jan’s final two fingers to ladylikeness. She was flaunting her tomboyishness and her taste for the shocking and disgusting, and had it not come after a period of depression it would have been purely hilarious. But again Dolf sensed that she was over-compensating.
Janet now had a boyfriend, whom she had met at the George School: Thomi Schmidt, a German-Jewish immigrant whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. ‘Mummy, I wonder how one ends a love-letter in German?’ she asked, sitting at the desk at 214 Central Park South. ‘I bite my tongue out at the root,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘swallow three times, & then say casually, “Why not look it up in the dictionary?” I get a lot of gorgeous private pleasure out of the irony of the situation…’ Trying to be a liberated modern mother, Jan took Janet to a doctor to get her fitted with a contraceptive diaphragm; her unshockability shocked Janet. Jan was adamant that Tony must not be told, in any letter, of Janet’s love for a German, even this anti-Nazi one.
Dolf’s furlough came up in September, and he went to New York for a fortnight. Reunited with him, Jan felt almost calm again, and whole. And for once, she left before he did. On 6 October she boarded The Mohawk, Train 5, Car 30, Upper 4, for what she rightly guessed would be her last lecture tour of the war years. ‘The farewell wasn’t so bad this time, was it?’ she wrote to him on the train. ‘Definitely it is far easier to be the one who goes away first. Next time let’s arrange to go simultaneously in different directions – nearly as difficult as arranging to come simultaneously! (A propos of that, I am as randy as hell. But don’t worry. I am so full of the sweetness of love that lust has no attractions.)’
She kept an un-private diary of this six-week trip, as well as writing private letters to Dolf. Reading both, the contrast between her outward stiff upper lip and her increasing inner exhaustion and loneliness stands out. Exactly the same ingredients which she had found so exhilarating on previous tours – staying in strangers’ houses, looking out of hotel-room windows, being taken out for dinner, shaking hands with hundreds of people, being the centre of attention at the coffee-party after the lecture – now wore her down. She saw their dark rather than their light side. Remarks on her Details of Engagement – ‘You will be required to attend a private luncheon and make a 10-minute speech. This is a special privilege they require from all our speakers’ – were merely tiring to contemplate. ‘Privilege’, indeed!
She was not sure which was worse: staying with people (in which case you had to be on best behaviour), or staying in a hotel (in which case you were lonely in a room ‘which contained everything you needed but nothing you ever wanted to see again’). At St Louis she was a guest, staying with Mrs T. N. Sayman of 5399 Lindel Boulevard. There was a butler, and an over-sophisticated daughter, Do-Jean, who discussed the steak and kidney pie with her mother over the luncheon-table. ‘Do-Jean, they’ve made this much better this time.’ ‘I don’t know, mother. I think the kidneys ought to have been soaked still longer in red wine.’ The atmosphere reminded Jan of ‘pre-prewar big country houses in England’, and she had a nightmare afterwards of going back to Britain and being forced to live in a Big House with a butler. ‘I woke up almost in tears. God, how awful it would be.’ After the St Louis lecture she slipped away to Walgreen’s delicatessen for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to avoid dinner at the Saymans’ table. At Wichita, Kansas, where she lectured at the University, she made friends with five college girls (Betty, Beverley, Joanie, Francie and Darline) and spent three relaxed evenings in their house drinking Cokes and 7-Ups and reading old copies of The New Yorker in front of the fire. She was becoming allergic to best behaviour.
At this very time Tony, a prisoner at Oflag 79 near Brunswick in Germany, was dreaming about precisely how wonderful it would be to live in a Big House with a butler. He was imagining the blissful reunion with his family. He wrote to Jan (she quoted the letter to Dolf), saying that he hoped ‘having a grown-up family would not make him feel too ancient’, and that he was ‘longing to take up the threads of family life’. Waiting for the war to end, he was planning the future. He and his co-prisoners would establish the Brunswick Boys’ Clubs, an idea they had dreamed up together, and for which many of them had promised generous sums of money. He might stand for Parliament, as a Conservative candidate in Perthshire. There would be long, happy summers at Cultoquhey (which he had by now inherited, his father having died in 1940). He would make the most of the house, as his parents never quite had … the food needed improving, and the wine cellar … he would install new bathrooms, and make sure there was endless hot water … he would invite his friends up for golfing house-parties, and for shooting, fishing and stalking … the gong would ring to dress for dinner, the last course would be a savoury (devils on horseback? cheese soufflé?), and there would be jazz records and billiards till late into the night.
Lecturing in city after city, staying at the Abraham Lincoln, the Leland, the Statler, the Commodore Perry, Jan put across the gist of her message: that ‘it’s no manner of use the politicians working out a democratic world set-up if the individual members of each group are going to go on behaving like bastards in their personal lives.’ ‘I know for certain,’ Dolf wrote to her, ‘that you are going on fighting your lovely private war against stupidity and indolence … I wish I could be with you or sit somewhere at the back of the room during that terrible moment when you begin to talk. And you would touch your hair with your left hand, as a sign that you had seen me…’
At Memphis, in the segregated South, she began to feel ‘the Jungles’ coming on, and her lecture, far from ‘going over swell’, seemed ‘to come out as a god-damned boring mess.’ The Peabody Hotel was the gloomiest yet; luncheon with the ladies of the School of Art Committee was ‘pure hell’; and a concert given ‘by a [white] man with a cold who had the effrontery to sing Negro songs in Negro dialect to a mixed but segregated audience’ was excruciating. In her diary, it was the injustice of segregation which was blamed for her misery; but in her letters to Dolf, it is clear that the misery was mainly inside herself. ‘I wish I was a riveter in a factory, or a carpenter, or a cowboy, or anything except what I’m being at the moment. I’m beginning to think lecture touring is the most loathsome thing in the world … I’m so TIRED…’
She could not telephone Dolf, because he was deep in the Mojave Desert on manoeuvres. This was a refreshing adventure for him, and he was feeling like a true buddy of ‘the Buddies’. ‘We’ve been sleeping in foxholes for the last 7 days’, he wrote to Jan in Buddy-speak, ‘(and does my back ache!), eating miserable cold grub (and did I throw up!), and shaving out of steel helmets (and did I cut myself!). But my health has never been better.’
Dolf’s morale was also lifted by the fact that there were German prisoners nearby, and he could watch them playing in the way he had played as a boy. ‘What a complete change of circumstances,’ he wrote to Jan. ‘They are the prisoners and I am the non-com with the rifle!’
One day, though it was strictly forbidden, he and some fellow GIs went and talked to the prisoners.
We took our truck down to the salvage dumps where the Krauts work. The guards – especially curious to have an interpreter – joined us and soon I and my buddies stood on the truck surrounded by 30 German prisoners and shooting questions back and forth. It is hard to realise (and yet it is an undeniable fact) that these hardworking, well-disciplined and quite humorous boys are the same who goose-stepped arrogantly through European capitals, murdering and bullying … They are all recently captured (in the South of France), partly by the French whose guts they hate. They are scared stiff of the Russians … their greatest fear is what the Russians are going to do with Germany, and that is their single reason for fighting on. Some of them, even married men with children, have been in the Army for seven years, unable to lead a normal life, and they are pretty tired of it. The wheel has come full circle …
If Dolf was out of reach, whom could Jan turn to? Feeling ‘utterly sunk’ in Kansas, she telephoned Bev Robinson at midnight to cry. At Columbus, Ohio, sobbing with loneliness at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, she picked up the telephone and rang Janet, who was at boarding school. She had never heard her mother in this state: it came as a shock. She got permission to take some time off school, and went to Cleveland to be with Jan for the last days of her tour. It was a rescue: Jan got through the final lectures, with Janet by her side. But she did not tell her daughter the true reason for her misery.
On Thanksgiving Day Jan was back in New York, on Dr Pardee’s couch, talking about the insoluble problems which had once again congested her mind on the lecture tour. And on that same day, at the Albert Hall in London, the United Thanksgiving Service was taking place in the presence of Winston Churchill. Jan’s poem ‘A Londoner in New England, 1941’ (quoted at the beginning of Chapter Ten) was read aloud by the actress Celia Johnson. When she finished the last line, ‘How can London fall?’, the orchestra swept into the final bars of Elgar’s ‘Cockaigne’ Overture. Churchill spoke: ‘We are moving forward, surely, steadily, irresistibly and perhaps, with God’s aid, swiftly, towards victorious peace.’
Janet took her mother and brother to spend Christmas with Thomi Schmidt’s family at Binghampton, New York. It was a time of rest and stability, before unknown upheavals to come. ‘1944 wasn’t quite as much “our” year as the preceding ones,’ Dolf wrote to Jan on New Year’s Eve, ‘but our love hasn’t changed. It walks into 1945 without too much hope but with the old feeling of perfection and never-ending meaning. Darling, I couldn’t say “Happy New Year” to you, but my thoughts are with you very much.’
* * *
An inspecting officer inspected Dolf’s office in January 1945, and said that his were the best records he had seen in all his years of inspecting. Dolf would not be sent overseas after all; and he was even invited to supper by the inspecting officer. ‘His wife was beautiful,’ Dolf wrote to Jan, ‘and when I heard her call him “Honey” I felt suddenly nostalgic for you and for our home, a feeling I always have when I see a happily married couple at home. “Nirgendwo fühlt der Fremdling sich fremder, als wo die Liebenden wohnen.”’2
The spring of 1945 struck both Dolf and Jan as beautiful, coming – as it must be – before an end. ‘Spring is in the air,’ Dolf wrote, ‘an irregular, unsystematic kind of spring, with bitter winter and full hot summer in it, an American kind of spring, but it makes me restless again. I wish at moments like this that it was all over, but the future is such an empty canvas, and we have nothing to print on it.’ Sitting by a lake in Central Park, Jan wrote, ‘I am just melting inside with the exquisiteness of the spring & the greening trees & the prospect of your coming.’
He did come to New York, on 10 April, and they had once again what Dolf called their ‘ghost-days’ together – the days of ‘bitter bliss’ just before parting, when it was almost as if the parting had already happened. Jan had not resolved her dilemma by travelling to America in 1940: she had merely postponed its resolution. The scene of farewell had moved from Battersea Park in May 1940 to Central Park in April 1945.
On 27 April, the morning after Dolf left to go back to California, Jan received a cable from Frankie Whitehead to tell her that Tony had been liberated ten days previously, and expected to be home shortly. Later that day there was a cable from Tony himself to say that he had reached England safely.
‘I cabled back suitably and lovingly,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘and said we’d get a passage back as soon as possible. I feel sort of numb and stunned and I can’t keep any food down – the usual thing. Oh God, I’m so genuinely thankful that he’s safe and well. I am not a ghoul, darling, and I am really fond of him and anxious to see him again. It’s only that my heart is all yours, and I cannot take it back with me.’
The Ministry of War Transport telephoned Jan on 4 May: there was a passage for them on the 8th. Frantic busyness was a merciful anodyne. Janet and Robert came home from school. The ‘raft of struggling actors, musicians and dancers’ helped with the packing, breaking off occasionally to make last-minute records on Jan’s recording machine. Trunks were sent off, loaded with gramophone records, teddy bears, soldering irons and musical instruments. The Golenpauls, Jan’s friends whom she had met through Information, Please!, gave a farewell party on the last day, during which Jan slipped into her hostess’s bedroom to sign a contract with Harcourt Brace for a collected edition of her poems, lectures and stories, to be called A Pocketful of Pebbles. Jan described the final hour to Dolf: ‘… And then I opened my last bottle of wine & we all drank our healths. And in the middle of all this, VE Day was announced on the radio & paper began falling through the sky like snow-flakes, & we drove to the station, nearly unable to get there because of the Times Square celebrations, & finally we LEFT, with all of them expressing their emotions in their characteristic ways. The whole thing was so ridiculously fantastic that I didn’t cry at all, but took a swig of rum & slept all through Connecticut.’
They were caught up in the Halifax Riots, when soldiers and sailors celebrated victory in Europe by smashing glass and looting beer, and their ship (the SS Bayano, a converted banana boat) could not leave for three days. On the voyage, they had little time to think: a gale blew for twelve days and nights, the ship rolled at forty degrees, and they had to lash themselves to the deckhouse in order not to be swept overboard, and to sling their elbows through ropes at night to stay in bed. The ship was travelling in convoy, and had to heave-to in mid Atlantic for sixteen hours because the deck cargo carried by the rest of the convoy was being broken up. Jan gave splicing lessons to sprawling groups of children, to distract them from seasickness. The crew had a drunken all-night party on the last night, after which an only-just-legible breakfast menu was typed.
Aching and bruised, Jan, Janet and Robert emerged onto the bomb-scarred terra firma of Liverpool. A row of old ladies of the WVS gave them bread and margarine on the quay. They noticed how old the dockers and porters looked: all men of normal working age, they supposed, must still be in the Forces. They took a slow train southwards, and eventually drew into Euston Station. Tony was waiting for them on the platform. Jan ran to him and hugged his thin frame.