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.
(Dow
n 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’.)
The Real Mrs Miniver Page 11
