Chapter Sixteen
From this day on, our love shall be
Open, for all the world to see:
And folk will smile who once would frown,
Saying, ‘At last you’ve settled down.’
That’s what they think: but we know better.
Theirs is the spirit, ours is the letter.
Our ship, which nine long years has tossed,
Helpless and helmless, nearly lost,
Upon the steep and perilous seas
Of a crazed world’s complexities,
Can now, with gathering speed and force,
Pursue a swift and steady course.
Let those whose goal is comfort hanker
For calm, for harborage, for anchor:
We two shall share our double realm –
I at the sheet, you at the helm.
Under bare poles we’ve ridden out the gale:
Come, love, no settling down – but setting sail.
‘The Blue Peter’, written on the morning of J.S’s wedding to Dolf, 1 March 1948
‘IT WAS A very short but dignified (just like me) ceremony,’ Jan wrote to her brother Douglas after the wedding, ‘mentioning God, but leaving out all the other schmaltz.’ A civil ceremony conducted by ‘a very nice fat man’, Mr Murray H. Stand, it was over by 11.30. After lunch with Pauly, Janet and a few close friends, Dolf and Jan moved furniture into their new apartment at 150 West 82nd Street, their love ‘open for all the world to see’. Dolf agreed with all of Jan’s wedding-morning poem, apart from the last line. He would have preferred ‘Come, love, no setting sail – but settling down.’ It seemed to him that they had done more than enough setting sail already.
‘The wedding was on 1 March and the secret is only just out,’ wrote the New York Times a week later, embarrassed not to have picked up on it sooner. ‘The new Mr Miniver, Austrian by birth, is now a naturalized American…’ Dolf and Jan read this on their sofa, during their stationary honeymoon at home. There was no hint of scandal in the paper, only surprise. No journalist found out that the love affair had been going on since 1939.
Jan’s long-repressed urge to show to the world her ‘unique companionship’ with Dolf found its release in the organizing of the post-wedding party: ‘Mr and Mrs Adolf Placzek request the pleasure of your company…’ It was to be a cocktail party at home on 20 May, and she invited almost everyone she could think of – literary friends, actors, broadcasting colleagues, author-acquaintances – and ordered in wine, pretzels and olives for more than a hundred guests. They came: the room was as cramped as a subway train, and Dolf felt that he – a junior librarian – was of no interest to any of these people. Standing in the doorway and longing to go out for a walk, he said to an unknown guest, ‘Well, I’d like to have met Ogden Nash, at least’, to which the man (also longing for a walk) replied, ‘I am Ogden Nash.’
After the party there came a time of easy domesticity. Dolf’s editions of Goethe’s poetry and Jan’s of John Donne’s were side by side on the same bookshelf at last. In May Jan entered her favourite state, book-wise: Harcourt Brace commissioned her to write an autobiography of the first twenty years of her life. They wanted it in October, for publication in the spring of 1949, and they talked of pre-publication in serial, which would bring in $15,000 on top of the advance. There were months to go until October, so Jan relished the prospect of glory and income without feeling it mattered if she didn’t start writing quite yet. Dolf worked at Avery, and she wrote him an untidy poem, ‘Kalbshaxen’ (‘Veal Shanks’), expressing the culinariness of early married love.
Liebstes:
I cannot imagine anything lovelier, mein Schlumperdinck,
Than hearing your key in the lock, coming home from your work,
And standing over the stove, cooking Kalbshaxen …
And smelling the smell of garlic (which you pretend to despise)
And of Love (which you worship without pretending),
And saying ‘Hello’, and watching you lie down on our Ehebett,1
Weary with unworthy Beamtenarbeit2
And close your beautiful tragic-humorous eyes,
And watch your full-lipped tragic-humorous mouth relax in sleep,
And go back to the little stove and tend the Kalbshaxen,
And season them with pepper and salt and oregano and garlic and love
– Above all the strong, sweet, pungent, aromatic herb of love,
Which is sweet-sour, suitable for feast-days and fast-days,
And utterly, beautifully Kosher,
And wait for you to wake up and share with me
Our dinner of herbs (and Kalbshaxen) Where Love Is.
In July they set sail, bound for England on the SS America. The typed card on the door of their cabin said ‘Mr Dolph Placzek. Mrs Placzek.’ They kept it. Now Jan could show him off all over again. She took him to meet her brother Douglas, who was charming, though more eccentric than ever: he had installed a toy train signal by his place at the dining-room table, and when he couldn’t stand any more of his wife’s chattering he put the signal at ‘stop’. They went to Wimbledon to meet ‘Fuffs’, who had looked after Jan in her teens. They had dinner at the Ritz Grill with Charles and Oscar Spencer, in whose flat in Cheyne Walk they had had their early assignations.
A long weekend in Paris with Robert was part of their plan for these fourteen days together in Europe. Paris! Images filled their heads. Dolf yearned to see the buildings, and the pictures in the Louvre, Jan to sit at café tables on pavements, listening to cars on cobbles and glimpsing lives through upstairs shutters. Robert longed to see ‘abroad’, never having been taken to the Continent as a child. Jan hoped Robert would relax with Dolf as they strode through the Tuileries discussing mansard roofs. But it didn’t work. It was yet another strained holiday. The air was stiflingly hot, the days seemed to drag on for ever, and there was no easy communication between Jan and Robert, or between Dolf and Robert. He had not yet come to terms with his mother’s divorce and remarriage, and his way of dealing with the awkwardness and his sense of wrongness was to become very quiet. Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral were balm for the buttress-starved Dolf, but for Jan and Robert, squinting upwards clutching their Baedekers, they were tiring for the feet and somehow un-nourishing for the mind.
On board the SS America: Dolf, Jan, Pauly, Susan
Dolf sailed back to New York, his holiday entitlement used up, but Jan stayed in Britain for another month. She took a train to Scotland to see Jamie, who was working as a student farmer near Kelso before going to the Edinburgh Agricultural College (as the laird’s eldest son, he wanted to train to run the farm at Cultoquhey). Sitting in a hay-loft, or by the edge of a field where oats were being cut, detached from her life, her desk, her telephone and her unpaid bills, comforted by the industrious proximity of her son, Jan found – after years of being unable to write prose – that, miraculously, she was writing her autobiography. Onto pads of ‘Old Chelsea China’ lined paper, words flowed out of her by the thousand: incisive vignettes of her parents’ unhappy marriage, rambling digressions about the ‘mountain range’ which separated childhood from adulthood, whimsical passages about downstairs loos and the smell of potpourri, touching descriptions of a child torn between the ‘upstairs’ and ‘below-stairs’ worlds of an Edwardian household. Across the Atlantic, Harcourt Brace were waiting for this, arms outstretched, and she was not failing them. ‘I have a kind of race with the reaper-binder, which takes about 18 minutes to make one round of the 27-acre field,’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘The circuit, naturally, gets slightly quicker each time, but it still takes me as long to write 500 words.’ And, the next day: ‘I sat in Jamie’s loft workshop with a writing-board made of planks, and wrote nearly a chapter of my book – 3,000 words – until my pen ran out of ink & my veins of blood from the damp cold. We had our lunch sandwiches in the car for warmth. I went for a walk up the hill after lunch & communed with rabbits in a pinewood.’ She had found another existence which suited her perfectly. She and Jamie dined one evening (at the Queen’s Hotel in Kelso, where they were staying) on grouse sent from Cultoquhey by Tony, who had no idea Jan was there. ‘It’s lovely being in a part of Scotland where one doesn’t own any of the land, & isn’t related to any of the people who do,’ she wrote to Dolf. She and Jamie did drive to Perthshire one Sunday to visit Tony’s sister Ysenda Smythe. ‘I can assure you,’ wrote Jan, ‘I felt not the smallest regret that I was no longer The Laird’s Lady.’
To get full value out of this new sensation of being anonymous in Scotland, Jan suggested a day’s poaching. She and Jamie ‘played hookey’ from the farm and drove to a flooded burn in the wild hills near the English border. They threw a piece of fence planking across for a bridge. Jamie fished, while Jan collected firewood (which was scarce, so she ripped bark off fence-posts) and built a fireplace, and lit dead bracken as kindling. Jamie came back with five small trout, which he gutted and Jan fried on a flat stone in butter scraped out of their sandwiches, seasoned with wild thyme. ‘A band of Indians appeared down the road,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘in the person of a band of Local Gentry, but luckily they were too far off to see what we were cooking, & Jamie’s rod lying in the heather: & anyway they couldn’t have got across the water if we’d withdrawn the plank bridge…’
It was yet more rebellious tomboyishness verging on the batty: but what worried Dolf was the taking of a day off from writing her book. He knew that momentum, with Jan, was vital. One day off, and the whole enterprise could start to disintegrate.
* * *
His fears were not unfounded. Arriving back on 17 September in New York (where her first intention, as she forewarned Dolf, was to ‘plunge into bed with you and merge my body and soul with yours’), Jan found that she had again lost the knack and the discipline of writing. Dolf had been promoted at Avery: he was now Assistant Librarian, helping to make decisions about important acquisitions for the library, and his hours were slightly longer than before. Jan railed against his responsible diligence. Her destiny, she still believed, was to set him free from the ‘mouldy (literally) library’ – but she was aware that his small monthly pay-cheque was for the time being their chief source of income, and that they needed it to pay the rent. She felt lost without him during the daytime: her terror of being alone had returned. In a poem she described the thoughts of a dependent wife:
I love three sounds within the house –
The ticking of the clock,
And the singing of the kettle,
And the sound of his key in the lock.
Partly, she was afflicted by the disinclination to write which almost all writers are familiar with: the feeling that any household job is preferable to facing a blank sheet of paper. Her prowess with odd jobs made temptation all the stronger. ‘If I went home,’ she wrote later, describing the experience of writer’s block, ‘the nail-holes in the plaster would stare at me, gaping for speckle as fledglings gape for worms; and the buttons would regard me with round accusing eyes, implying that they couldn’t be blamed for not doing their duty if they were not given the proper conditions to work in. Children can be reproachful, animals even more so, but there is nothing to touch the martyred unctuousness of inanimate objects in need of attention.’
But the problem went deeper than this. Bennes Mardenn, who remembers every day with Jan as if it were yesterday, recalls that during the autumn of 1948 Jan showed him the chapter from her manuscript in which the young Joyce saw the parents of her friend Kathleen Gascoigne having a mock-quarrel, before the father picked up the mother and carried her out of the schoolroom, laughing and talking. ‘Jan wept when she showed me that. It brought up too much. Her love for her mother and father, and their loathing for each other, tore her apart.’ In the hay-loft in Scotland, detached from her own worries, she had mustered the inner strength to tackle the emotive subject of her childhood; but now, back at her own desk amid the paperwork of divorce and exile, she could no longer think clearly. ‘The stress on her mind [Jamie wrote later] inhibited her from reliving her childhood accurately enough to commit it to paper.’
‘She walked with the palms of her hands out,’ Bennes remembers, ‘– the defenceless walk. I have not seen that before or since.’ Her frailty touched him deeply. She asked him if he would mind coming to sit quietly in the apartment with her during the daytime, getting on with his work in another room. He did this. When he didn’t have anything to do, he brought pretend work. In this way, avoiding solitude, Bennes overlapping with Pauly and Pauly overlapping with Dolf, Jan tried to stave off despair. But it came. She fell headlong into the worst depression she had yet experienced. All the joy of the past year – impromptu music-making at Alexander Place, inspired broadcasting, suddenly-flowing writing, poaching in the Borders – turned out to have been the exaggerated bright side of a condition which inevitably revealed its equally exaggerated dark side. And when you were in the dark side of the cycle, the bright side seemed illusory.
But how could she be depressed, when she was married to Dolf? Wasn’t this what she had longed for, and pinned her hopes on? The quotation from Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman is apposite – ‘There are only two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.’ The final hurdle in the journey to happiness had been crossed, but she still felt like a ‘divided wretch’. Contentment and inner peace still eluded her, and there was no one left to blame but herself.
Was it the case that marriage to Dolf was an anti-climax after nine years of illicitness? Did their love dwindle slightly, in the daily drudgery of buying and cooking veal shanks and washing up the saucepans afterwards? It did not dwindle, Dolf has claimed, vehemently, and all the evidence in Jan’s later diaries and letters bears him out. Their love remained as strong as ever after marriage, and continued to grow deeper by the day.
There was depression in the family, and it may be that Jan would have suffered manic swings whatever had happened in her life – even if the war had never come and she had sat out a long, superficially happy marriage with Tony. It was, partly, a hereditary medical condition. But it is clear that circumstances had exacerbated it. She had got herself into a vicious circle, worrying about money, and about not writing her book: worrying so much that she could not eat without vomiting, which made it even more difficult to work on the book, which made her worry still more. She was heartbroken by the loss of the ‘family pattern’ and being separated from the children, who didn’t write many letters. Even a non-depressive woman might suffer sleep-depriving pangs of anxiety and remorse on finding herself in such a situation. But for someone prone to depression like Jan, such anxieties could be the catalyst of deep despair.
She could not bring herself to write a letter, let alone a book.
When I say physically impossible to write a letter [she wrote to her brother Douglas later, when he, too, was having a nervous breakdown], I mean just that: a literal, even if psychologically-induced, paralysis of the limbs which makes the effort of taking up a piece of paper and making marks on it with a pen so monumentally, inconceivably difficult that, sooner than do it, one rushes to the loo and vomits instead: the only relief that’s left to one, after one has got to the stage of not being able to cry. That was one of my worst horrors – excelled only by the sheer horror of having to answer the telephone. (‘What – me answer that screeching devilish contraption? Actually pick it up and say “Hello?” and perhaps hear some bad news, or a voice I don’t like, or a bank manager saying something nasty, or even a nice boring person who wants to come to dinner? Impossible. I won’t, I can’t, I shan’t, I’d sooner die, who the hell do they think I am, don’t they know that I am in hell and mustn’t be bothered? Let it ring – no, don’t let it ring – throw something at it, and stop it, and meanwhile just let me lie down on the floor, preferably under a table, and put a bearskin rug over my head and DIE…’) Does that ring a bell, or don’t you have that one?
She could not face psychiatric help, and lived on a diet of sleeping-pills, sherry and cigarettes, unable to keep food down and sobbing herself to sleep in Dolf’s arms. Without telling her, he called in Dr Lawrence Kubie to see her. She was furious that he should have done so, and screamed; Dolf moved out of the apartment for a week. But Kubie took the matter in hand. He gave her pills to calm her nerves, and insisted that she start having appointments with him again. She agreed; and he realized, while listening to her sobs, that the ‘swings’ between the over-active drive and the retarded-depressive drive were now out of control.
Just before Christmas Jan received a letter from Curtis Brown, the literary agents who had taken her on after the war (after years with A. P. Watt): ‘I’m afraid “Displaced Persons” [a poem she had written] has now been seen and declined by the New Yorker, the Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and Tomorrow. I’m afraid there are no further likely markets for this one and so, sadly, I’m returning the manuscript herewith.’ These were all, except for the New Yorker, magazines which had published Jan’s poems in earlier years. A few days later another letter followed: ‘I’m afraid “Green Warfare” has reached the end of the road.’ ‘Pome’ was declined by seventeen publications. She had apparently even lost the art of writing publishable poetry.
But Curtis Brown were delighted with the first seven chapters of her autobiography, taking her life up to her early teens, which she had sent them in September. They suggested having illustrations drawn by E. H. Shepard. Glory was so near: all she needed to do was get herself to the age of twenty, and the autobiography would be finished.
But the picking up of a pen remained out of the question. On 4 February 1949, on Dr Kubie’s recommendation, she was admitted as a voluntary patient at the Austin Riggs Center at Stockbridge, Massachusetts: a ‘psychiatric sanatorium’, a ‘nursing-home hotel’ – or, as Jan and her co-patients liked to call it, a ‘loony-bin’.
* * *
Here, a four-hour train journey from New York, in white-shuttered seclusion, she sobbed on the couch of Dr Kubie’s friend Dr Allen B. Wheelis, the Center’s resident psychoanalyst. Appointments with him took place every other day, and seemed to lead to nowhere. The clock ticked. Jan snuffled and blew her nose and wiped her glasses and put them on again, and then started crying again and took them off, and Dr Wheelis receded into a blur, and she blew her nose and put her glasses on again; and so it went on until the appointment was over and he said ‘We’ll stop there.’
Between these appointments, life became a succession of gaps of time which had somehow to be got through.
Describing her first day at Miss Richardson’s Classes in Great College Street, Westminster, aged six, when writing her autobiography a few months earlier, Jan had said that she had discovered she liked being a New Girl, and that this feeling had stayed with her all her life. She could not have known, as she wrote it, that she would soon be a New Girl all over again in an institution uncannily similar to a boarding school, but that this time she would be almost incapable of enjoyment.
It was like a boarding school in that the corridors smelled of polish, the food was institutional (mushy spaghetti, and meatballs hard enough to play billiards with), friends tended to stick together in groups in the common rooms, there was a carpentry workshop in the grounds and a shop to buy snacks, and the tables were laid for breakfast immediately after the supper had been cleared. It was an expensive institution: Jan was there free of charge, ‘on a scholarship’, and slightly frowned on by the ‘full-tariff girls’.
But it was actually a grotesque version of an Angela Brazil school paradise. The evening sight of the laid breakfast tables was a torment for the residents: it signified the changelessness of their mental states. The stage was set for another pointless day, just like the one which had nearly ended. All the residents were suffering from some kind of anxiety neurosis: some, like Jan, were so mentally and physically paralysed that they could hardly bring themselves to walk the fifty yards from the therapy centre back to the main building. Others were the opposite: all too keen to ‘act out’ their neuroses by running naked round the grounds, shouting. The first thing you did here, on waking up, was to take half a Seconal sleeping-pill, or ‘goof-ball’, and try to postpone consciousness. Then, when the Beethoven’s-Fifth-Symphony ‘ta-ta-ta-tum’ knock came to wake you up, you lit a cigarette in bed and smoked it, holding it between shaking fingers. Appetiteless, and with knees wobbling, you went to the dining-room and forced down cereal before going straight out to the corridor to smoke. Then, if your appointment on the couch was not till 11.30, there was a two-hour gap to fill.
Jan’s two friends here were Hope Patterson and Harriet Harvey. There were male residents as well – Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, came here for rest and recuperation in the 1940s – but at this time in her life, Jan was seeking the company of women rather than men. She was quite changed from the ‘kittenish’ ‘child-wife’ who had so infuriated Anne Talbot on the Rumanian duck-shooting holiday in 1929 by her insistence on being the constant centre of male attention. Now she longed to talk to women, especially ones who were suffering like her, and to help them. The three sat on rocks talking about husbands, failed marriages, the dread of solitude, ‘the Willies’ and ‘the Tarantulas’ (their names for ‘the Jungles’), and the ‘Change of Life’ (as the menopause, often blamed for mid-life depression, was called). All too familiar with psychiatrist’s jargon, they parodied it, sprinkling their chat with ‘let me rephrase that’, ‘we’re skirting around the periphery’, ‘you are free to leave at any time you wish’, and ‘we’ll stop there’. If someone said she didn’t feel like playing chess, the rejoinder would be, ‘Resisting, huh? Come on, try to be a little co-operative.’
A strict unwritten code developed among these women: if one of them was feeling desperate and asked you to ‘shoot a little pool’ to bridge the gap before lunch, you went and played pool with her, however black you might feeling, however little you cared whether any ball went into any pocket.
‘The Shop’ – the carpentry workshop – was open for four hours a day, closed on Sundays. While it was open, Jan was there. In the depths of her depression, though waking each morning with ‘the jitters’ and ‘the Willies’, she finished an inlaid chess table which was by far the most carefully-worked piece of furniture she had ever made. ‘At one moment,’ she wrote proudly to Jamie, in an effortfully cheerful letter, ‘it had no less than 23 clamps on it overnight.’
Three months after she had arrived – and still with no improvement in sight – Dr Wheelis suggested that it might help to ‘unblock’ her if she attempted to get down on paper some of the thoughts which went through her head during the monotonous days. So on the morning of 17 May, returning to her room after her breakfast cigarette, she forced herself to sit down at her typewriter. ‘This is an experiment,’ she began.
Yesterday was a particularly awful day. Mondays are always bad, especially after a good weekend – and the weekend had been better than usual, full of that sweet flowing interchange of thoughts and feelings between Dolf [who visited her at weekends] and me which is the mainspring of our rare relationship. In spite of all our worries and problems and joint nostalgia, it was a good weekend. By contrast, as well as intrinsically, yesterday was hell …
She went on to describe a typical day at the sanitorium:
After lunch comes a very long Gap. You long sometimes to take a nap: but you have learned from experience that you will wake up with an even worse attack of ‘tarantulas’, and will regret having exposed yourself to the horrors of two awakenings during the twenty-four hours instead of one. Sometimes you have letters to answer, and sometimes you go for a drive or a walk. None of these occupations is boring in itself – it’s just that all the time, but absolutely all of the time, the agony and worry are going on inside you, and the sense of futility, and the despair at getting nowhere. And outside the spring is going on, and you can’t feel it, and you think of that line out of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’, when he’s talking about sunsets and mountains and so on: ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’
She described the feeling of being ‘blocked’ as a writer:
It’s no good people saying, ‘Sit down for an hour or two a day and WRITE!’ You can’t spin writing out of your own belly like a spider spinning a web: it’s something that comes partly from outside, or rather, it’s a two-way process, born of your own relationship with the universe … I’m like a radio set that’s on the blink: I can’t tune in any more to any programme worth listening to – only to soap operas and third-rate commentators. And yet I know that all the time the ether is full of Brandenburg Concertos and superb performances of Antony and Cleopatra.
She filled fifteen pages: and the act of writing about the tawdriness of the ‘hell’ did have the effect of helping her to see her way out of it. Two days later, during her appointment with Dr Wheelis, she read aloud to him what she had written. When she had finished, he said, ‘I find that very moving.’ It seemed a pity, he said, that it couldn’t be published somewhere, and he asked her to carry on writing. He went to the bookshelf and produced some pamphlets for her to read, about ‘Artistic Experience’ and ‘Aesthetic States of Mind’, and Jan was encouraged and touched. This was what happened to her mood:
I left his office and walked back to the Shop in a state of definite and recognizable euphoria – that state which in my experience you only get into (no, not only, but most often) when you are either in love or have just written something which you feel is good and genuine, especially if it has just ‘moved’ somebody else whose opinion you value, whether to tears or laughter. I found myself walking springily, and I thought of the rightness of all the old clichés, such as ‘walking on air’, ‘being in high spirits’, and ‘having a light heart’. I felt walking was far too prosaic a means of progression, and that it would have been more appropriate to my mood to go all the way from Wheelis’s office to the Shop turning cartwheels.
When she reached the lawn in front of the main house, she saw ‘Polish John’, the gardener, in his bare feet, pushing the mowing machine, and she realized that for the first time since her depression she was able to smell the grass – always for her and for Dolf a symbol of joy. Not only could she smell it: she could also feel in her own shod feet the sensation Polish John must have been feeling in his bare ones. The ‘two-way’ relationship with the universe was beginning to return.
On 6 June Dr Wheelis suggested that she try going home to New York for the weekend. She was nervous about this, partly because she was worried about what people there might think. ‘I can imagine myself running into Fatso Kubik, our Czech superintendent,’ she typed, ‘and him looking at me and seeing that I am apparently in perfect health, with a sun-tan, as fat as a pig, and then me having to explain that I’m only back for the weekend and shall be leaving again on Sunday night: and I can imagine him going down to his apartment in the basement and discussing it with his wife and saying, “Well, it don’t look to me like there’s anything wrong with her. Why don’t she come back and stay back? Sump’n screwy about the whole set-up.”’ But she went. Dolf collected her from Grand Central and she felt ‘like a farmer’s wife on her first visit to the Big City’, shocked by the traffic jams and hooting horns. He carried her over the threshold into the apartment. She went round touching everything, and embraced her Staffordshire zebra. After dinner at their local Italian restaurant (annoyingly called ‘Tony’s’), Dolf played the piano while Jan unpacked, and they went to bed early in the sweltering heat. She woke the next morning with ‘slight Jungles’ but made breakfast for Dolf. ‘It was the first time he had had breakfast made for him for over four months, and he was most touchingly thrilled about it.’
In this quiet, homely, unadventurous way her recovery continued, and she left Stockbridge for good in July, five months after her arrival.
* * *
August was spent away from the heat of New York, on Island 727 of the 30,000 in Georgian Bay, Ontario, staying with Bev and Marian Robinson. A photograph survives of this vacation: a picnic scene, in which a smiling Jan is holding her pocket-knife threateningly towards Dolf’s face. She could still be an unnerving person to be at a picnic with. She peppered her talk with four-letter words (which invariably came as a shock to anyone who expected her to be like Mrs Miniver); but apart from her swearing and her occasional knife-wielding, she was good company.
A manic gesture with the pocket-knife
In New York she was on the radio and television again, appearing on quiz programmes and doing ‘Guest Spot’ jobs, and she signed a contract with Columbia Broadcasting. ‘You can be forgotten in America,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘because they have been so goddamned loving that they’ve run you ragged with popularity, and you think you’re down & out & flat-broke & will never stage a comeback – and then you do one little 15-minute radio show, as I did last week, & within 24 hours they’re all on your neck again.’
But she and Dolf were none the less almost ‘flat-broke’, and could not legally break the lease on an apartment which they could no longer afford.
Our rent at this apartment sorry flat is so screwing sorry fucking high [she wrote to Douglas], namely $1680 a year for two repeat TWO rooms, that we are perpetually one jump ahead of the sheriff, which doesn’t worry me because I was born with a silver bailiff in my mouth, but does worry Dolf, who comes of a respectable Viennese family. He had two ‘firsts’ yesterday: (1) he found his own name in Debrett – a thing that his grandfather, the Grand Rabbi of Moravia, would hardly have foreseen happening; and (2) he had his first bounced cheque returned, from the Columbia Men’s Faculty Club. So I had to take a taxi down to the Guaranty Trust (it’s so expensive being broke, don’t you find?) and cash a cheque, and Dolf braved the Faculty Club cashier. He was terribly upset and embarrassed about it last night. ‘Do relax, darling, and let me go to sleep,’ I said to him. ‘Everybody in Debrett has bouncing cheques … Two terms abshlutely sh’nonymous…’
But then something happened which was a little bit eerie, but which brought a sudden prospect of financial rescue. MGM were in the process of making a sequel to Mrs Miniver, to be called The Miniver Story: and they had taken a liberty with Jan’s fictional character. She wrote to Jamie explaining the state of affairs:
We are in the midst of two delicious bits of legal proceedings, one against our landlord, who is the son of a bitch, and one against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who is so to speak the bitch that our landlord is the son of. Briefly, it seems that MGM have nearly finished making the sequel to Mrs M., and that Mrs M. dies of cancer in the last act. I have (genuinely) received no less than three offers recently to do a sequel myself, and the gist of my case is, ‘Oy, you carn’ do that there ’ere.’ We are very much hoping, and it looks pretty promising, judging by the obviously damp state of the MGM attorney’s pants, that they will what’s delicately called Prefer To Settle It Out Of Court. If not, then they’ll bloody well have to settle it in court. Bastards. Even if I didn’t want to accept the offers, they’ve still got no right to make it impossible for me to do so by killing the old girl off.
MGM did settle it out of court. On 15 February 1950, after coming home from seeing The Third Man at the cinema (‘Dolf and Pauly cried in their beards and were ganz nostalgic, and it was simply thrilling, and if you haven’t seen it you must,’ Jan wrote to Jamie), Jan received a cheque from MGM for $13,000 – $5,000 for the sequel, and $8,000 in damages for killing off Mrs Miniver. They celebrated with Kümmel. ‘Let’s not waste all this lovely money,’ Jan said. ‘Let’s spend it.’
She did not find it difficult. The swing from penury to riches echoed her swings from depression to euphoria. In June she and Dolf sailed to England, where they missed Robert. He was nineteen, doing his two-year National Service in the Scots Guards, and had been commissioned and sent to Malaya with his regiment a few weeks before she arrived. This, for Jan, was ‘sickeningly disappointing’ as well as worrying. Robert was not communicating with her by letter, and she longed to see him. She and Dolf spent time with Jamie in Scotland, and went to Paris to meet Janet, who was staying there; Jan and Janet got on badly, and Jan returned to New York feeling that two of her three children were out of sympathy with her.
But she also returned with a comforting prospect in view: Jamie was to sail to America in September, and he and she planned to go on a road trip for three weeks. She wanted to show him the country she had grown to know and love during the war years, and he wanted to look at American livestock and farming methods. But she found that, rather than looking forward to his visit, she was merely dreading his leaving, even before he had arrived.
Still reckless with the proceeds of the MGM damages, Jan and Dolf moved into a ground-floor apartment at 68 West 68th Street which had its own garden (‘Moving house is my favourite indoor sport,’ Jan wrote to Jamie). While they were settling in and putting plants into pots, The Miniver Story opened in London at the Empire, Leicester Square. (It had been filmed in Britain, in a quest for the ‘realism’ which had been missing the first time.) ‘Remember the Minivers!’ proclaimed the MGM advertisements. The public, it turned out, preferred to remember the Minivers as they were in the original picture, rather than be re-introduced to them looking tired and ill in post-war Britain. The film lost Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $2,311,000. The only good thing the Punch critic could say about it was that Mrs Miniver’s death in the last act at least ensured there would be no further sequels, ‘for which on the whole we may be grateful’.
It is a dreadful film. Its direction by H. C. ‘Hank’ Potter merely emphasizes how good William Wyler’s was. In the original film, no scene went on for too long; in the sequel, every scene does, and a pall of gloom hangs over the whole. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon still play the leading roles, Garson looking middle-aged and careworn and Pidgeon lacking the wit and wryness which made the first film uplifting in spite of its tragic events. The children are all utterly changed. Vin is absent altogether, his death in the Battle of Britain fleetingly mentioned: Garson had refused to act with her former husband Richard Ney. Judy, now played by Cathy O’Donnell, is a cold, depressed post-war maiden, and Toby, played by James Fox, has grown into a charmlessly precocious and loud-voiced twelve-year-old. The audience knows Mrs Miniver is dying of cancer – the film opens with her visit to the doctor for the diagnosis (‘not less than six months, not more than a year’) – but Clem doesn’t, and the first hour is spent in the dreary tension of waiting for her to collapse and then break the news to him. In one of the dullest scenes of the film, she and Clem dance together, slowly and sadly, in his office overlooking a bomb-site, to the music of a barrel-organ playing outside. After seeing to it that Judy marries a good honest local boy rather than the cad she is in love with, Mrs Miniver dies. Clem is left with the last words, reflecting on her goodness and wisdom.
The film opened in at Radio City in New York in October; but Jan was not there. She never saw it. Though she always dissociated herself from the character, she knew privately that a bit of her was, or had once been, Mrs Miniver, and nothing would induce her to witness her death at the hands of a Hollywood studio.
Jamie arrived in New York, and off he and Jan went on their agricultural tour of America.
Liebstes [she wrote to Dolf from Cabin 2, Bass Point Camp, Lake Rd 14b, Missouri on 17 October 1950], Remind me never to be away from you for so long ever any more. Silly, ain’t it, to get so mixed up with another human being that one feels a 3 weeks’ separation is a kind of amputation? (And besides, I am as randy as hell.) At the same time, I’m glad you weren’t able to come with us, because you would have been bored to a frazzle and sick at the stomach with fast driving, and with the inspissated foulness of the food we’ve been forced to eat. Really what I think of American cooking …
Jamie is a very sweet companion, and we have lots of jokes all the time, and lots of hill-billy music on the car radio. We stop here & there by the wayside when we see interesting breeds of pigs, sorry, hawgs, or cattle, & go and ask the owner about them. The heat at the Kansas City show was terrific, & even Jamie got a mite tired of looking at bulls’ behinds …
The whole country is too big, & all the middle part ought to be compressed & shrunk like one of those South American Indian human heads.
Was it middle America that had changed, or was it Jan? She was not sure. All she knew was that she was falling out of love with the country which had so enchanted her during her wartime travels. In those distant, gasoline-rationed years, each small town she visited had seemed fascinatingly different from the last: now, she was aware only of their ‘ghastly, ghastly sameness’. Was it just that there were no charming, dowdy sponsors waiting to greet her at each town or give her a ‘bokay’ on railway platforms? Or was it that a new complacency was settling where unspoiltness had been? It was perhaps a bit of both. Showing Jamie America, she wrote afterwards, felt ‘like introducing him to somebody one has married but has in the meanwhile fallen out of love with and now sees the faults of.’
She waved goodbye to Jamie as he boarded his ship back to Britain and came home to an angry letter from Janet about a radio-phonograph Jan had sold without asking Janet’s permission: and these two things tipped her over into the new depression she had felt coming. All the good that Stockbridge and Dr Wheelis had done a year before seemed to have been undone. She was back where she started. The symptoms were the same: confusion, perpetual tension and sobbing, an inability to keep food down, revulsion against cooking and letter-writing, a disinclination to answer the telephone, a feeling of inadequacy in company, and a dread of being alone.
Desperate to recapture the magic that had worked eighteen months before, she started typing a diary of her days to show to her new psychiatrist in New York, Dr Jackel, recommended by Dr Wheelis. His method during appointments was not to ask her a single question. ‘I begged him to ask me questions,’ Jan wrote in her first instalment on 12 December 1950, ‘but he said the usual stuff about how if he asked questions it would put ideas into my head about what he considered important. I started trying to tell him about my childhood, and my parents not getting on, and how I felt a dread of the repeating pattern: but in the middle of it all I was overcome with discouragement and despair and folded up almost entirely.’
Now she had every reason to panic. If each ‘cure’ from depression was only temporary, was it worth being cured at all?
Will it go on this way for the rest of my life? If so, I can’t see the point of being alive, with this dread of recurrence hanging over me. The happiest thing would be to get killed in an accident at one of the moments when one is normal and on top of the world: but that kind of thing doesn’t happen, and anyway, when I’m on top of the world I have such a keen zest for life that I don’t want to die, ever. Was it real, that sense of joy, that welling-over of love and sympathy towards one’s fellow-beings, that energy, that desire to help make the world better for people, that urge to create things? If it was real, how can it have so utterly gone? What is real, and what is unreal?
She carried on with her television and radio appearances throughout this time, and audiences had no idea that she was a nervous wreck when not in public view. With a supreme effort of will, she could act her former self for long enough to ensure that, as she put it, ‘the show could go on’. She appeared on the television programme Celebrity Time as a co-guest with the critic John Mason Brown, in which they had to play charades and tell ‘riveting little anecdotes’ about their literary careers. Jan felt ‘jittery’ all afternoon, and found the endless waiting beforehand, with camera rehearsals, almost intolerable. ‘But it went off all right – as far as anything so idiotic could be all right. There were fifty people in the studio, spending nine hours preparing for half an hour of almost complete crap.’
Each week in February and March 1951 she was on the panel of a television programme called We Take Your Word, in which the players had to make up the etymology of a given word. Two were false, one was correct: it was an etymological Call My Bluff. This was Jan’s response to the word ‘pumpernickel’: ‘A young lieutenant in Napoleon’s army arrived on horseback at an inn in Prussia one evening, tired and hungry. After arranging for his horse, Nicolai, to be watered and stabled, the officer demanded his own dinner. The innkeeper’s wife brought him an unfamiliar dark bread which he took a bite of and then threw on the floor with disgust. “C’est bon pour Nicolai!” he said.’
The audience laughed and clapped: but by the middle of the night, Jan was back in a state of despair. The act of typing long tracts about her days was not helping this time. The magic which had worked so well at Stockbridge, she realized, must have been like an amulet or a magic charm in a fairytale, which only worked once.
In the mornings, when Dolf went out to work, someone always came to sit with her. One day, when neither Bennes nor Pauly could come, Pauly arranged for one of her Viennese friends to come instead: and this visit induced in Jan a final wail of despair.
Well, she arrived – a nice, quiet little woman with a kind face. She asked whether there wasn’t some mending or something that she could do for me, and I managed to find her a few stockings and slips that needed washing, which she is at present doing in the bathroom. No doubt she is wondering how the hell I can be in this state and yet still be able to go on doing the radio and television jobs. She must think I’m such a phoney – or maybe she understands more about such things than I imagine she does. Poor thing – she lives quite alone in a little apartment on 98th Street, and she has very little money and – at the moment – no job. She was in concentration camp in Europe and lost everything, like so many of them. And here am I, by comparison so damned lucky and well-off and successful – what must she think of me for being ‘depressed’? It’s one of those cases which one feels ought to make one ashamed of grumbling about anything – but it just doesn’t work that way. If one’s in this kind of state, one loses the ability to make comparisons. Hell is absolute, not comparative. How am I to get out of it? How, how, how?
There was a way out. In August 1951 Jan was diagnosed as having breast cancer, and a mastectomy was carried out at once. Her revulsion against living was replaced by a deep and justified fear of dying.