Chapter Seven
Those whose love’s no more
Than a blind alley –
A cul-de-sac
Which can have no other end
Than turning back
Or beating with bare hands
At a wall without a door –
These must go slowly.
These at a measured pace
Must walk,
And linger in one place
Often, to gaze and talk;
Even retrace
A yard or two, perhaps,
Their careful steps,
And take them over again.
By such fond strategy,
They may a long while cheat
Themselves into content,
And not too deeply care
That Fate across the threshold of their street
Has scrawled ‘No Thoroughfare’.
From ‘The Cul-de-Sac’ in The Glass-Blower
‘IT OCCURS TO ME,’ suggested Peter Fleming in a letter to Joyce in November 1938, ‘that Mrs Miniver’s Xtian name is Mabel, and that you should reveal this shameful fact at some festival, as it might be Christmas.’
Surely not Mabel, thought Joyce. It was her children’s nannie’s name. It would be one ‘M’ too many. And how could she reveal the woman’s name without introducing some contrived snatch of conversation which would wreck the poetry of the interior monologue?
So she did it on the Letters page instead, on 17 December: ‘I am, Sir, yours faithfully, Caroline Miniver.’ Mrs Miniver’s letter to The Times was a motherly appeal to her readers to search their ‘put-away cupboards’ for clothes to send to Lord Baldwin’s Appeal Fund for Refugees, and it was effective. Five days after its publication, the one room previously in use at the clothing depot in Westbourne Terrace had multiplied to seven, and parcels were arriving steadily throughout the day by post, rail, car and hand. They often came with a covering letter, such as this one, from ‘Highgrove’, Sunbury Hill, Torquay: ‘Mr Nicholls is sending the enclosed dress suit. Some years ago he took up conjuring as a hobby in winter evenings, hence the unusual pockets. He hopes it will be found in some form to be of use to a refugee.’
Joyce helped out at the clothing depot as often as she could: her Scottish spinster friend Ruth Berry was the organizing secretary and told her what to do. A refugee, Mr A. Miesels, described the scene at the depot for the Jewish Times (it was translated from his original Yiddish):
The clothing department occupies three stories. Smart ladies of highest social standing in the English Aristocracy, and young girls are engaged in sorting and picking out the most useful articles. Miss Ruth (who by the way is very proud of her Biblical name) explains to me that one has to be careful not to hurt the feelings of the Refugees by sending them unworthy cloths. She also introduced me to a young lady, to whose recent appeal in the ‘Times’ the English population responded most generously from the farthest corners of England.
At tea-time a wooden box was brought into the office and the ladies around that improvised table talked, not about weather, kittens, but about Lord Balfour, Dr Herzl, Palestine … One’s heart is growing with joy when one realises the marvellous attitude of the noble Gentry towards the unfortunate refugees …
(This was a year before thousands of such refugees, so dazzled by British kindness, were interned as enemy aliens.)
‘Mrs Miniver’ was beginning to bring Joyce the power to do good in big, public ways. She was fascinated by the Jewish refugees, with their heart-rending combination of intellectual wealth and material destitution. She was meant to be sorting clothes, but she was easily distracted into conversation (in English or schoolgirl German) with the violinists, poets and scientists who wandered in. Romantic and lacking in political perspective, she would take up the cause of a single musician and fire off imploring letters to men in high places. ‘As you will appreciate,’ came a reply from the headquarters of the Lord Baldwin Fund, ‘musicians are even more difficult than writers, when it comes to a question of placing them in work. People can be induced to take a domestic servant, or even a doctor, but musicians are even normally regarded as a luxury.’
‘T. out.’ ‘T. to Manchester.’ ‘T. to Sandwich.’ ‘T. stayed at Rye.’ Joyce’s engagement book for 1939 (not leatherette: a Walker’s ‘Flexor’ in red morocco) suggests much time spent apart. But at least now there was an excuse for escaping. She was truly busy. The Times was commissioning a leader once a week and still expected its fortnightly ‘Mrs Miniver’; Chatto & Windus were collecting the ‘Mrs Miniver’ pieces for publication; and Joyce was lying awake at night, worrying whether the sensitive-fingered Mr Hans Mahler would find a domestic position.
The Maxtone Grahams in the school holidays, 1939
‘Three times a year, during the school holidays, that one remaining branch – our intense love for our co-parenthood of the children, and our joy in their company – burst into miraculous blossom…’ So Joyce wrote years later, looking back at this time. In the holidays there were still days of marital happiness. That Easter of 1939, Tony, Joyce and the children were united in a next-door-garden-tidying project at Rye. A day of apple-tree-pruning and bonfire-tending did not need to be improved on when Joyce used it for ‘Mrs Miniver’: it really was as idyllic as a typical Miniver day. ‘Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilised life the opportunities for it are all too rare.’ Sitting up in the branches, Joyce/Mrs Miniver watched as the two eldest children raced snails up the gate-posts and the youngest made an elaborate entanglement with twigs and cotton over some newly sown grass, and regretted only that ‘circumstances had never led her to discover that the way to spend the spring was up an apple tree, in daily intimacy with its bark, leaves and buds’. Tony/Clem handed her up a glass of beer.
‘We’ve made a lot of difference today,’ he said. ‘You can almost see the shape of the trees.’
‘I suppose’, said Mrs Miniver between gulps, ‘the brambles would try to make out that the apple-trees had been practising encirclement.’
‘That reminds me,’ said Clem. ‘We ought to be getting home pretty soon if we don’t want to be late for the news.’
The stabs of Hitler-induced anxiety were becoming more frequent, for the Maxtone Grahams as for the Minivers. But Joyce’s naïve optimism carried on. In a Times leader of 18 July, she was still saying, ‘During the War – we must on no account allow ourselves to get into the habit of referring to it as “the previous war”…’
‘Worked at Bloomsbury House, 2.30–8’: Joyce was the kind of person who put some of her nobler achievements into her engagement book after they had happened, so that she could flick back with pride. Bloomsbury House, in Great Russell Street, was one of the headquarters of the Jewish Refugee Committee: in a slow queue, German, Austrian and central European refugees made their way to the desk for a small weekly hand-out of money, a square meal, help with financial paperwork, and advice about employment. Joyce was drawn to Bloomsbury House, haunted almost to the point of obsession by the arriving Jews and longing to help them in some way. The man behind the desk in the Financial Guarantees office was her friend Sheridan Russell, cellist, Jew, and do-gooder, with whom she had made friends at the clothing depot. Sheridan-Christ, she soon came to call him, for not only did he work tirelessly and unpaid at Bloomsbury House; he also introduced her to the man she was to love.
Tony and Joyce drove up the Great North Road to Cultoquhey in time for the Twelfth of August. The cousins gathered, the nannies argued, boiled rabbit was served in the nursery, the children rode their bicycles on the gravel: all was as normal, and London seemed far away. But suddenly the black clouds were overhead. Neville Chamberlain made his broadcast to the grown-ups on Sunday morning, 3 September, and the grown-ups rephrased it to the children, telling them that war with Germany had broken out.
‘To children,’ wrote Joyce in ‘Mrs Miniver’, ‘even more than to grown-ups (and this is at once a consolation and a danger), any excitement really counts as a treat, even if it is a painful excitement like breaking your arm, or a horrible excitement like seeing a car smash, or a terrifying excitement like playing hide-and-seek in the shrubbery at dusk. Mrs Miniver herself had been nearly grown-up in August 1914, but she remembered vividly how her youngest sister had exclaimed with shining eyes, “I say, I’m in a war!”’
* * *
With bombing expected, there was no going back to school in London. Jamie was at Gordonstoun, the school founded in 1934 by Kurt Hahn in a huge mansion in the far north of Scotland. Joyce had sentimental feelings about Gordonstoun, partly because she had spent summers there with her cousin Ruth as a child, when they had smoked the butler’s cigarettes and written poems sitting on gravestones; and partly because of Kurt Hahn, whom she hero-worshipped for being both Jewish and a scout: she imagined school life there would be one long knot-tying, camp-fire-lighting adventure. But Jamie, a highly intelligent, lazy and non-games-playing child, loathed the school. It was remote, it lacked kindred spirits, and the days consisted of a succession of physical discomforts, many involving cold water.
Janet and Robert were sent daily to Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, with new uniforms and gas-masks. Joyce stayed in Perthshire for a fortnight to settle them in and returned to London on 23 September. It was turning into a childless city. Separated from her own children, she wrote with feeling in a Times leader:
In many of the more well-to-do houses there may have been other valuables which had to be removed to the country or lodged in the bank. But in the poorest homes the children were the only treasure: and now that they are gone the parents must be feeling destitute indeed. Some of them, looking at an empty cot, a stray slipper, a doll lying face-downwards on the floor, may be tempted to think that the burden of anxiety which has been lifted from their minds by the evacuation was almost easier to bear than the burden of silence and loneliness which succeeded it. It is astonishing how loud a noise children can make simply by not being there; and how large a table for six can seem when there are only two to sit at it.
Her instinct, as a wartime writer and later lecturer, was to console: to focus on small inspiring sights, and renew her readers’ or audiences’ faith in the fundamental benignness of the world. But she no longer felt able to write her ‘Mrs Miniver’ pieces in the serene essay style. In peacetime, the thoughts of Mrs Miniver about windscreen-wipers or tree pruning or door-knobs were all very well; but now, with the black-outs, the evacuations and the genuine fear of death in the air, exquisite prose poems no longer seemed apposite. She changed to the epistolary style, and wrote to an imaginary sister-in-law: ‘Dear Susan … With love, yours ever, Caroline.’ These letters are less good, as writing, than the earlier essays. It is as if Elizabeth Bennett had stepped out of Pride and Prejudice and started chatting on the telephone: the gossipiness jars. The essence of the pleasure of the earlier essays lay in the way one was distanced from Mrs Miniver by the third-person narrative, while gaining intimate access to her thoughts. In letter form, some of her mystery is lost and she becomes just an unusually observant, talkative female.
But as bits of bracing journalism which in November and December 1939 made Times readers sit up straight, the Miniver letters were good. ‘It oughtn’t to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn’t to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.’
She found endless things to be uplifting about: the nice ‘damp jutey smell’ of sandbags, and the sight of people sitting on them eating sandwiches; the way London was beginning to look and sound like a country town, with its tinkle of bicycle bells and clopping of hoofs; the cheerful brightness of white clothes; the way people’s figures were improving through exercise; the beauty of buildings’ silhouettes in the moonlight of the black-out, and the enhancement of the sense of touch, when you clutched hold of railings which you couldn’t see; the singing of the barrage balloon cables which made you feel you were ‘going to sleep on a ship at anchor, with the sound of wind in the rigging’; the way Londoners were learning to carry gas masks with panache, as if they were going off to a picnic with a box of special food.
But there were two things Caroline Miniver missed:
The first is golden windows. It used to be so lovely, that hour after the lamps were lit and before the curtains were drawn, when you could catch glimpses into other people’s lives as you walked along the street: a kitchen table with a red cloth and a fat cook writing a letter, laboriously; or a ground-floor sitting-room, very spick and span, full of obvious wedding presents, with a brand-new wife, rather touching and self-important, sitting sewing, her ears visibly tuned for the sound of a latch-key; or an old man by the fire, doing a crossword, with an empty afternoon behind him and an empty evening in front. And occasionally, by great luck, a dining-room with a child’s birthday party going on; a ring of lighted candles round the cake and a ring of lighted faces round the table; one face brighter than all the others, like a jewel on the ring. But now all this is gone. Houses slip straight from day to night, with tropical suddenness.
The other thing I miss, terribly, is children. Not only my own – I do at least see them (and plenty of others) at weekends: but children in general, as an ingredient of the town’s population, a sort of leaven. It may be different in some parts of London, but certainly round here they have acquired rarity interest. They used to be daisies and are now bee-orchises. One looks round with a lift of pleasure on hearing a child’s voice in a bus …
The reason why Mrs Miniver saw ‘plenty of other’ children at weekends was that the Minivers had taken in seven ‘tough, charming’ evacuees at Starlings. ‘To tell you the truth [gushes Mrs Miniver], I think Mrs Downce [the housekeeper] is delighted to have some Cockney voices in the house. It makes her feel at home in Darkest Kent. She had quite a Dr-Livingstone-I-presume expression on her face when she welcomed them in.’
Mrs Miniver is scathing about a grand lady she meets who insists on having only ‘really nice children’ as evacuees. Snobbishness about evacuees is one of Mrs Miniver’s bugbears.
But Tony and Joyce were not asked to take in any evacuees at their country cottage. It was too near the coast to be officially regarded as safe. The closest they came to evacuees was seeing those from the Glasgow slums who were housed in a stable-block at Cultoquhey. Joyce was preaching, in ‘Mrs Miniver’, what she was not able to practise in real life. In the matter of evacuees, the saintly Mrs Miniver was an idealized Joyce.
On 26 October 1939, the book Mrs Miniver was published. Covered in what looked like spare-room wallpaper (‘a gay binding’, said the Chatto advertisement), it came in its own slip-case, the perfect present, for 7s. 6d. It contained only one of the wartime Miniver letters: apart from the last five pages, all was pre-war.
The book was widely and favourably reviewed, but two famous authors were scathing. E. M. Forster wrote at length in the New Statesman:
What answer can the villagers make to a lady who is so amusing, clever, observant, broadminded, shrewd, demure, Bohemian, happily-married, triply-childrened, public-spirited and at all times such a lady? No answer, no answer at all. They listen to her saying the right things, and are dumb. They watch her doing the right things in the right way, and are paralysed. Even if they disgrace themselves by spluttering smut in her hearing, she is not put out, for the class to which she belongs has grown an extra layer of thickness of skin in the last thirty years. ‘Touchée!’ she would exclaim, with her little ringing laugh, and pass on untouched.
(No one, in the book, ever splutters smut in the direction of Mrs Miniver. Where did Forster get this from, and why? ‘He is a cock-eyed intellectual,’ wrote Barrington Ward in a consoling letter to Joyce, ‘full of internal distortions and disorders.’) Forster continued:
There is something the little lady has not got – some grace or grandeur, some fierce eccentricity, some sense of ancient lineage or broad acres lost through dissipation. She may be able to give chapter and verse for a distinguished ancestry, but distinction does not course in her blood. She has her own style, but she has not Style … Her shabby old car, her unsnobbishness in living only in Kent, are deftly exploited, and serve to snub another lady who has smarter cars and lives in Gloucestershire. But dinginess is a dangerous weapon. It may break in the hand if used carelessly.
Then he discussed the class to which Mrs Miniver did, he thought, belong:
It is a class of tradesmen and professional men and little Government officials … and we who belong to it still copy the past. The castles and the great mansions are gone, we have to live in semidetached villas instead, they are all we can afford, but let us at all events retain a Tradesman’s Entrance. The Servants’ Hall has gone; let the area basement take its place. The servants are unobtainable, yet we still say ‘How like a servant!’ when we want to feel superior and safe.
(To which Joyce replied, in her first lecture about Mrs Miniver, given at the Mayfair bookshop Heywood Hill: ‘Now I don’t deny that I have heard that sort of remark made – though just as often by the “top drawer” as by the “top-drawer-but-one”. But I myself would never dream of making it, nor would “Mrs Miniver”. And if Mr Forster himself has ever made it, then all I can say is that he is not the man I took him for, and all his books must have been written by Francis Bacon.’) Forster ended his review:
Just as Gloucestershire and Kent have become alike, so will England, Germany, Russia, and Japan become alike. Internationalism, unavowed or avowed, is a cert. Bloodstained or peaceful, it is coming. As it looms on the eastern horizon, the little differences of the past lose their colour, and the carefully explored English temperament seems in particular scarcely worth the bother that has been taken over interpreting it.
(Down the margin of which, in her collected edition of Forster’s essays, Joyce scribbled ‘Balls’.) If Mr Forster’s prophecies were correct (and Joyce didn’t believe they were), it was the best justification one could have for writing a book like Mrs Miniver. If things were going to disappear, whether they were wild flowers or duck-billed platypuses, it was doubly important to write about them. Forster (said Joyce in her lecture) seemed to be confusing class-consciousness with class hostility.
Class-consciousness is not in itself a bad thing, any more than any other kind of consciousness. On the whole, there is far too little consciousness in the world. No; what matters is what use people make afterwards of the impressions which their senses have collected. There is no harm whatever in noticing that one class pours out the tea first and puts the milk in second, while another class makes a point of doing the exact opposite. The harm only begins when one member of the former class says to another, ‘What sort of girl is it that Maud’s boy’s goin’ to marry?’ and the second one replies, ‘My dear, quite impossible – she puts the milk in first.’
Rosamond Lehmann wrote a vitriolic review in the Spectator:
Mrs Miniver is, we know, secure in the hearts of the majority of her public; and I must be taken as speaking only for a minority, upon whom she exercises an oppression of spirits which, since it is caused by such a charming person, appears at first sight due to mere jealousy and spite. Yet surely it is odd that anyone so tactful, kind, tolerant, popular, humorous and contented, should arouse such low feelings, even in the ever-dissatisfied minority? And then, if one happens to dislike the spectacle of so much success, why not simply ignore it, and turn away? Why read, as one must, with exasperation, the column she has with such modest triumph made her own? Why does one look out for her next appearance with such feelings as the deserving poor must entertain for the local Lady Bountiful, or the inmates of a Borstal Institute for a certain kind of official visitor?
As a fortnightly column in The Times, Mrs Miniver had lived quietly in the minds and hearts of her readers. Now, dressed up in her gay binding in a book-in-a-box, she seemed fair game for mockery. ‘She is always so smug, so right, such a marvellous manager,’ wrote M. F. Savory of Worthing in a letter to The Times.
It would be so much more helpful if Mrs Miniver would tell us how she would behave if her husband had an affair with a pretty ARP worker, if her son refused to join up, and if some of the workers at the hospital supply depot rose up in revolt and told the lady exactly where she got off. No, I think the only thing for Mrs Miniver is a direct hit from a bomb, and I am certain that within a month Clem would marry again a young and pretty, untidy woman, who never said or did the correct thing, and they would be enormously happy, and so should I.
Joyce sought revenge in small ways. Competition No. 512 in the New Statesman of 16 December was to write a parody of one of a choice of authors, including ‘Jan (Mrs Miniver) Struther’. Joyce sent in an entry, under a pseudonym. It began, ‘Curious, thought Mrs Miniver, pensively nibbling a langue-de-chat…’, and it won.
Sir [wrote Joyce to the editor of the New Statesman], I am afraid I must plead guilty to a slight deception. When I saw the announcement of your competition, I felt pretty sure that I could write a far crueller satire on ‘Mrs Miniver’ than could any of my detractors. I therefore tried my hand at it, and sent in the result over the name of my friend, Miss K. Watkins. As I seem to have succeeded beyond my wildest hopes, and as my close connection with Mrs Miniver precludes me from accepting the prize, I have no choice but to reveal myself.
Would you be so good as to send the prize to the competitor who was next in order of merit – or, if you would prefer, to the Association for the Relief of Distressed Gentlewomen?
Jan Struther
The vitriol helped the sales: 6,500 copies of Mrs Miniver were sold in the first eight weeks. Though she was hurt by the sarcasm and loathing, Joyce distanced herself by nursing the thought that she herself was not Mrs Miniver, and was indeed becoming less like Mrs Miniver every day.
* * *
Jewish refugees in their hundreds shuffled towards the Financial Guarantees desk at Bloomsbury House, their gait suggesting hearts broken, their brows suggesting university degrees. So why Sheridan Russell picked out one of these refugees and beckoned him to the front of the queue no one – not even Russell himself – quite knew. There was something about his face.
Adolf Placzek, the man in the queue, trembled with fright at the moment of this beckoning. Having spent the last twelve months in Nazi Vienna trying not to be noticed, he had learned to dread, more than anything, being singled out by a man behind a desk. But he went, as bidden. He was asked questions.
‘Are you a poet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Also interested in the arts, and music?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s all in your face. There’s not much I can do now, but I might be able to get you occasional work as a tutor.’
Then he took Dolf back to his place in the queue.
A few days later, Joyce asked Sheridan if he knew of anyone who could help her to improve her German.
Dolf had arrived in London in March 1939, virtually penniless and with a single suitcase. He had been born in Vienna in 1913. His grandfather had been Grand Rabbi of Moravia, a scientist, poet and ornithologist who corresponded with Darwin. Dolf’s father died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, and his mother, Pauly, married Fritz Eisler, a distinguished X-ray physician who had severely damaged his hands through using an X-ray machine without wearing lead gloves. Dolf’s childhood in the highly respectable Neunte Bezirk of Vienna consisted of piano lessons, violin lessons, Latin and Greek lessons, lessons in German poetry, and hours spent at his desk in the evenings after school. When he was fifteen, in 1929, Joyce was within a mile of him during her sulky visit to Vienna.
If Dolf, at the piano, stopped practising his examination piece and began to experiment with chords, his stepfather would tell him to get on with his practice. ‘Mucking about at the piano’ had its own word, klimpern (‘jingle, jangle, clink, chink, tinkle’). Dolf longed to klimpern.
When he was eighteen he was summoned to his stepfather’s study.
‘You have been accepted at medical school, and you are to start in September.’
‘But I don’t want to be a medical student. I want to be an art historian.’
‘That’s enough for tonight.’
That was the end of the argument. For three years, Dolf went to medical school. Each evening for three years, he sat at the same supper-table as his stepfather, in silence. Dolf had never failed an exam at his Gymnasium; but at medical school he failed every one. He had no aptitude for medicine; and he was squeamish about surgery. One of his early ‘practicals’, on a cadaver, was a simple appendectomy. Dolf was told that he had ‘killed’ his ‘patient’ in fourteen different ways, and still hadn’t managed to get the appendix out.
Dolf in Vienna, at his studies
After nine terms of exam-failure, Dolf was allowed to give up medicine and begin a History of Art course at Vienna University. He flourished. The history of art, and particularly of architecture, fascinated him He read widely and studied deeply. He fell in love with a poet, Maria Santifaller. But the atmosphere of anti-Semitism was beginning to cast a shadow over his hopes. Three days after the Nazis marched into Vienna in March 1938, Jews were declared to be no longer members of the University. Dolf was summoned into the Director’s office. ‘There will be a way for you, but not here. I wish you well.’
Maria, a non-Jew, could have betrayed Dolf but did not. She said they should run away together, to Michigan. But how to get out? Dolf’s passport had been renewed: ‘Deutsches Reich’, it now said; there was large inky ‘J’ on the front page, and a photograph of a persecuted-looking man in glasses. For the next few months Dolf queued at one consulate after another, trying to get a visa. A rich old lady friend in New York, Anne de Tapla, who was half-mad, turned out to be the key to freedom. She sent an affidavit to Vienna which got Dolf and his mother and sister Susan a place on the waiting-list for the United States. With this, Dolf could now get a transit visa for England: ‘Good for one journey only.’ Before leaving Vienna he went round his old apartment in the Wasagasse taking photographs of the corner of the drawing-room, his desk, the cook in the kitchen, the favourite tea service – all his familiar surroundings – in case he should never see them again.
His sister Susan arrived in London in the autumn of 1938 and found a job as a nurse at a Quaker hospital. Dolf arrived in March 1939, a year after the Anschluss, with his cousins Ernst and Franz Philipp, who had also managed to get out. They found lodgings in a seedy attic room at 100 Denbigh Street, Pimlico, and they queued at Bloomsbury House. Thanks to Sheridan Russell, Dolf soon got a part-time job there as an interpreting clerk. In the evenings the three cousins walked the streets, for mile after mile. During the lonely London weekends, uprooted and under-occupied, they sat in their room tearing one another’s poetry apart.
Farewell photographs of Dolf’s Viennese home
Their landlady, Mme Luhn, was a kind-hearted former Madam who insulted her lodgers while ladling them bowlfuls from great vats of pot-au-feu. One evening after supper, when the cousins were sitting upstairs as usual, scorning one another’s use of cloud-imagery, Mme Luhn called up the stairwell: ‘Monsieur Placzek. Le téléphone.’ Dolf trembled again. He ran down four flights.
‘Hello, you won’t know me. I’m Joyce Maxtone Graham, a friend of Sheridan Russell’s, and he gave me your number because he said you might be interested in giving German lessons.’
They arranged to meet outside Lyon’s Corner House in the Strand, at 4.30 on Tuesday, 21 November. ‘I’m very small,’ said Joyce, ‘and I’ll be carrying a white gas-mask.’ ‘Placek, 4.30’ she wrote in her engagement book, spelling his name wrong. (Later, in the United States, Dolf was careful to emphasize the ‘cee-zee’, as he learned to call it, in the middle. The name is pronounced ‘Plah-chek’.)
They met; and so strong was the instant attraction that neither of them could eat their rock cake. ‘I don’t feel too good in my stomach,’ Dolf said. ‘We don’t call it “stomach”’, said Joyce. ‘We might possibly call it “tummy”.’ ‘Pardon?’ Dolf needed to learn the social subtleties of English, she noticed, as much as she needed to improve her German. He told her he had learned his colloquial English on an exchange visit to Ramsgate in 1935. Joyce advised him at once to ‘forget Ramsgate’.
Dolf was a foot taller and thirteen years younger than Joyce. She was in love with the idea of him before their initial encounter: being Jewish, Viennese, twenty-six and recommended by Sheridan Russell, he could hardly fail to fascinate her. As soon as they met, they both felt an overwhelming sense that they were (as they later called it) ‘one river’. It was not a case of irresistible cheekbones: Dolf did not have film-star good looks. Joyce described his face as ‘tragic-humorous’: the nose was large, the forehead wide, the smile neither sardonic nor sleek but boyishly uncontrolled, the eyes hidden behind round spectacles, the gestures gawky. If Dolf needed to scratch his right temple, he brought his left arm over the top of his head and reached down to the itch. But he had immense sex appeal, and Jan’s string of scurrying thoughts at the moment of their meeting might have run like this: tall, thick black hair, couldn’t be less like Tony, lean, young, hands of a pianist, Viennese accent exuding high intellect and high passion, only pleased by the finest things in life, but intensely and sensually pleased by them.
Feeling light-headed, unhungry, and already at home in one another’s company, they read the notice-board outside the National Gallery. ‘Concert, 5.30 today.’ ‘Let’s go in,’ said Joyce. She had already been to one of the new Myra Hess National Gallery concerts: Mrs Miniver, in her letter of 16 October, had described it:
All sorts of people, young and old, smart and shabby, in uniform and out of it, soldiers, nurses, Salvation Army girls, typists, office-boys, old ladies with ear-trumpets, and a few of the regular ‘musicals’ with coiled plaits. A few were there, perhaps, out of curiosity, but most of them because they were suffering from a raging thirst for music, and for some assurance of pattern in a jangled world. She played magnificently and thoughtfully, almost as if she were discovering – no, uncovering – the music for the first time. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms – ironical, isn’t it, how the world has to turn to the great Germans to find healing for the spiritual wounds inflicted by the ignoble ones? There were so many people in tears that it might have been a revivalist meeting. So it was in a way. And the curious thing was that everything she played seemed to have a kind of double loveliness, as though she had managed to distil into it all the beauty of the pictures that were missing from the walls.
This time, all Joyce said, as she and Dolf came down the steps after the concert, was ‘Bach is so all-right-making, isn’t he?’ The compound adjective struck Dolf as perfect. ‘Who is this magical creature,’ he wondered, ‘who can express what I have always thought about Bach but have never found the right words?’
The German lessons started at once, three times a week, at Halsey Street. The subjects discussed tended to be metre and botany. The daily letter-writing also began. Each wrote in the other’s language: ‘Lieber Herr Placzek!,’ ‘Dear Mrs Graham’. Joyce wrote on ‘Mrs A. Maxtone Graham’ postcards, and Dolf, in italic handwriting which spoke of years steeped in Goethe, on torn-out sheets from a Pimlico stationer’s pad.
Joyce, on Christmas Eve, from Rye: ‘Anne Talbot ist gestern abend angekommen. Jetzt spielen sie alle Golf (Anne, mein Mann, Jamie und Janet). Um vier Uhr werden wir den “Messiah” auf dem Rundfunk zuhören. Heute nacht die drei Kindern werden die Strümpfe aufhängen. Leider kann ich nach London diese Woche nicht fahren. Meine nächste deutsche Stunde muss deshalb im Jahre 1940 sein!’1
Dolf: ‘The refugees – I can recognise them in the street at the first glance. I shun them whenever I can. I never suffered more than when I was a clerk at the Bloomsbury House, not even in Germany. There one could show courage, dignity, heroism. Now, in safety, free (while the less agile and lucky who have not been able to get out slowly die at home) – what remains? Outside the petty financial misery, and inside aimless emptiness. Dante was right who said that the worst what can happen to a human mind is exile.’
The tone could not have been more different from one of Tony’s letters. Here was raw emotion, sadness examined head-on.
On Christmas Eve, the three Viennese cousins were sitting in the attic as usual when the doorbell rang. It was the postman, and he handed over a large parcel addressed to Herrn Placzek and Philipp: ‘With all best wishes for Christmas, from Joyce.’ It was a basket of peaches. Peaches in winter! The symbolism was not lost on the three poets. The attic room seemed suddenly full of the warmth of a Mediterranean country, of abundance, indulgence, and hope. They ate some of the peaches, and got to work incorporating the event into their verses.
The first days of 1940 were dark and cold. Joyce was with her family at Rye, writing postcards to Dolf by the fire. She said how dangerous it was to make new friendships in a world where separation and death were becoming commonplace: you laid yourself open to the risk of severe pain. Dolf sent her some of his poems. They discovered they had used the same images, almost word for word, in poems they had written before they met. ‘Dear, dear Dolf,’ wrote Joyce on 13 January, breaking into English, ‘This becomes more and more extraordinary, and almost uncanny. All poets, perhaps, come from the same springs in the same mountain, but occasionally two of them seem to come from the identical spring, and that is what has happened here. It is not as though we can have been influenced by reading the same lyrics in our childhood. I give it up – it is a riddle.’
Janet and Robert, still being kept away from London, started at Rye Grammar School. Joyce returned to London, through snowdrifts, to take Jamie to the overnight train for Gordonstoun. London was white with snow. The school train left at 7.30 on Thursday 18 January; and in the hours afterwards Dolf and Joyce became lovers.
‘Ich bin sehr schläftig,’ wrote Joyce to Dolf the next day, ‘und voll von einer Süsse, friedliche, traümende Glück. Ich habe dich lieb, und ich freue mich dass wir bald wieder zusammen sein werden.’2
Writing in German made Joyce feel it wasn’t quite Joyce Maxtone Graham who was writing. It was akin to the pleasantly guiltless feeling of spending foreign currency: you could convince yourself that it wasn’t quite real, and that you would not have to suffer the consequences.
But within days, the implications began to weigh on their hearts. If you fell in love with a man on a waiting-list for a visa for the United States, the ‘severe pain’ of parting wasn’t a risk, it was an inevitability. ‘Ours is “eine Schiffskameradschaft”,’ Joyce wrote to Dolf, a friendship between two people thrown together on board ship, who would have to part when it docked. They must remember this; they must not depend on each other’s presence. As soon as Dolf got his visa for the United States, he would have to leave the country. After months of losing sleep over not getting a visa, Dolf was now losing sleep over getting one.
For someone as susceptible to mood swings as Joyce, the situation was precarious. Elated, dancing on air, she would make her way from Halsey Street to 113 Cheyne Walk, where she and Dolf met on their ‘Zusammentage’ – their days together while Tony was in his office or playing golf at Rye. Her friend Charles Spencer had lent them a room, overlooking the river. It became ‘their’ room, and all the sounds outside – the tugs hooting (as they had in Mrs Miniver’s hearing), the houseboats lapping, the evening newspaper-seller chanting the war headlines – were for ever after associated in their minds with these days of intense secret happiness. Their hours together, Joyce wrote later, were ‘full of the sweet flowing interchange of thoughts and feelings, which is the mainspring of our rare relationship: physical love-making, though the most ecstatic and satisfying that I have ever had, is between us only the overflow from a deep lake.’ They walked together in the early evenings, over the bridge to Battersea Park, or along the river to a National Gallery concert, trying to live in the present moment.
Joyce would return to Rye by train, writing to Dolf on the journey. The children would be waiting for her; she hugged them; they had supper together, chatting about school. She and Tony sat by the fire afterwards, late into the evening. Joyce switched the wireless on and tuned it to the Home Service. Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ trio sent her into a reverie. She was with Dolf as she listened. She was divided into two, and she was full of a sense of foreboding. She had already known the guilt of an adulterous love affair. But she had never known the ‘guillotine feeling’ – the knowledge that at some moment in the near future the loved one would sail away and she would not see him again.
The guillotine began to hover over their meetings: Joyce found it impossible to banish it from her imagination. ‘I wish I could live in the present like you,’ she wrote to Dolf on 14 February. ‘But I can’t. When I love, especially, I need the future as a kind of sounding-box in which the sound of the present can ring clear. A present with no future, to me, has a muffled sound, as though one struck a bell in a box. Anyway, I will try, on Saturday, to forget that there is not an unlimited vista of Saturdays stretching before us…’
On that next Saturday Joyce made excuses to be away from Rye – an article to finish at The Times – and she and Dolf went to Brighton together, where they were snapped by a street photographer as they squinted in the south-coast glare: spring lovers enjoying a stroll. As Europe began to fall apart around them, they stole what private happiness they could. When she found herself with an unexpected free day, Joyce sent Dolf a telegram saying when and where to meet. There were wartime regulations against using foreign words in telegrams, so instead of writing ‘Deine J.’ at the end, she wrote ‘Dinah J’. From that day on, she signed her letters to him ‘Immer deine kleine Dinah’.
Taken by a street photographer in Brighton
Dolf’s visa for the United States arrived on 28 April. (His mother had managed to escape from Vienna, and had sailed to New York the month before.) He secured a passage on a ship to New York which would leave from Liverpool on 29 May. On hearing the dreaded date, Joyce lay awake for most of the night. ‘Ich bin um 6 Uhr aufgewacht, so voll Verlangen und Begierde fur dich, dass ich fast in Flammen war. Ach, Gott, wie verliebt bin ich in Dir…’3
On their last day together, they took photographs of each other on a bench in Battersea Park. ‘My sweetest beloved darling,’ wrote Dolf, after the final goodbye, ‘Now this first day is over, which was so sad, so hopeless, that I didn’t write even. I don’t know how I spent it, only that I sat at the piano and played again and again “Auld Lang Syne”, and “Comin’ through the rye” and “Ach, wie ist’s möglich denn”…’
Joyce did not go to Liverpool with Franz Philipp and Dolf’s sister to see him off. She wrote a letter to him instead, addressed to the hostel in New York where he would be staying. Franz was glad she had not gone to Liverpool: ‘It was an awful crowd of refugees there,’ he wrote to her in his broken English, ‘much crying and oriental gesturing, as we called it. Suzy was very, very brave. Only a little sobbing when we stepped the platform back. Really, it was very good you weren’t there. It makes everyone miserable.’
Dolf was gone. Again, Joyce was divided in two. Half of her, crushed and exhausted by the loss, wanted to die.
There’s no way of knowing
What like the day will be,
The day he must be going,
My true love, from me.
There’s no way of knowing
(And it’s little I shall care)
If the wind will be blowing
Or the sun shining fair.
But oh, I’m praying only
That the tide may be low
When I stand there lonely
To watch my true love go.
For then, as I wander
Back across the strand,
I’ll see a while longer
His footprints in the sand.
The tide, inward creeping,
Will steal them one by one,
And I’ll not start weeping
Till the last of them is gone.
But there, where it vanished,
I’ll lay my body down,
And cry, ‘My true love’s banished:
Christ, let me drown.’
But the other half – the optimistic Mrs Miniver half – wanted to live, and do good, and see justice done. ‘It does seem a little hard, I must say,’ says Mrs Miniver’s friend Agnes Lingfield over coffee in Sloane Street, in one of the last ‘Miniver’ letters, ‘that one should have been unlucky enough to live in a time like this.’
‘Good old Agnes, how she clarifies one’s feelings,’ writes Mrs Miniver – and this is Joyce speaking. ‘Till that moment I had not realized how passionately I felt that I would not live in any other time if you paid me. I didn’t say so; after all, the coffee was on her. But when I left her I found myself crossing the street with particular care, because it would be so awful to get run over just now and not be there to see what was going to happen.’