The Real Mrs Miniver
Page 19
Audiences enjoyed this friendly babble: it was the antithesis of lecturely pomposity. The loose title enabled Jan to break the lecture up into sections rather than droning on about a single subject for sixty minutes. She liked to give an impression of off-the-cuffness in her lectures, though in fact she honed them for hours in the silence of her hotel rooms. ‘I know a lot of folks who say they always make their talks extemporaneously,’ she said in an interview for the Charlotte Observer in February 1943 before one of her lectures. ‘Yes, and they sound like it, too.’
‘Please tell us something about your husband,’ said the Charlotte journalist. ‘If you want my husband’s name,’ replied Jan, smiling, ‘you’d better get out your pencil, because it’s pretty long. He’s called Anthony Maxtone Graham. He’s a prisoner-of-war in Italy. And he’s doing nicely. I had a letter from him only four days ago. It was written last October.’
* * *
That letter had taken fourteen weeks to arrive. Some took longer. Most did not arrive at all, whether to or from Tony. The weekly allowance for a POW to send was one airmail letter form, and one postcard. Out of a total of fifty Tony sent to his family from Chieti Camp in Italy, only three were delivered. To judge from these three that have survived (none to or from Jan), it is clear that captivity (or rather, the consequent freedom from the responsibility of being grown-up) had an inspiring effect on Tony. He blossomed. Jan, in her scathing Ogden-Nashese poem about fidelity, had advised against ‘letting him [one’s husband] in for amateur dramatics in any shape or form’. But now she wasn’t watching. Tony’s latent talents as an impresario were reflected by his election as ‘Chairman of Chieti Entertainment’. To Jamie and Ysenda he wrote:
I have written a longish 1-act play & am going to embark on the most ambitious play-writing project shortly … Music is going strong; we have a theatre variety orchestra, a dance band & a chamber-music orch., all of which come under my aegis. We had a Mozart concert on Sunday which was hugely successful. We are lucky in having Tommy Sampson, a dance band leader in private life, & above all Tony Baines, the Philharmonic player, who is superb. They work from dawn till lights out, scoring & rehearsing … We have not had any scores supplied to us yet, tho’ we got the instruments without too much difficulty. The theatre is great fun, & we have produced an enormous variety of entertainments. Again we have no play scripts but James Oliphant [Tony’s middle names – his POW nom-de-plume] has been kept busy! I have done three 1-act plays, one full-length thriller, and one full-length trial so far – very successful, though I say it. Every show runs for 4 performances – about 300 of an audience at each … I have had good letters from USA but no acknowledgement of any of mine … Tobacco is my principal want; and books on playwriting, and books of plays.
An illuminated testimonial given to Tony by his fellow prisoners mentions the forty-five plays he produced, including The Admirable Crichton, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and HMS Pinafore (there was much ironic cheering at the line ‘Or an Ital-i-an’).
A prisoner-of-war-camp theatrical production. The ‘bead’ curtains are made of thousands of rolled-up cigarette papers
While Tony had respected Rommel’s soldiers, he held his Italian guards in contempt and up to ridicule. Notices were put up warning the prisoners not to walk or loiter too close to the barbed-wire fences, drafted by the commandant, too proud to ask for a translation from the Senior British Officer, with the help of his pocket commercial dictionary: ‘PASSAGE AND DEMURRAGE NO ALLOW’. As a marine insurance broker, Tony knew that ‘demurrage’ was the charge paid by ships which loiter too long in port. The pompousness of the notice inspired Tony and his fellow prisoners to all the more fun, in spite of the guards.
While Jan was keeping up the morale of the lecture-going public in America, Tony was doing the same for the Chieti prisoners, many of whom might have sunk into despair but for his contagious good spirits.
* * *
Dolf, in uniform, boarded his Army train, and set off westwards across America with ‘the buddies’. Far from being the violin-playing types Jan had hoped for, they were sweet-natured, thick-necked men who talked about girls and tried to prise from Dolf the truth about his love life. Catching his first sight of the Mississippi, one whistled and said, ‘There she is, the big mother fucker.’
Mother – what? Dolf had never heard the expression before, and his Viennese sensibilities were ruffled. Saying that about a river? He tried not to think of Pauly.
His address, in the coming months, was ‘Company B, 77th Infantry Training Battalion, Camp Roberts, California’. As soon as it was discovered that he could type, he was marked out for desk work, rather than combat duty. His wartime service, as he later described it, was ‘on the typewriter front’. Three thousand miles away from anyone he knew, six thousand miles away from his homeland, he relied on Jan’s letters for sustenance. And they came.
‘When are you going to write your next book?’ journalists often asked Jan. A sequel to Mrs Miniver, or a book about America?’ ‘Next week, positively next week, I will begin writing that book,’ she sometimes replied. But, in truth, no such book was germinating inside her. Apart from her lectures and occasional poems, all her creative energy was channelled into communicating with Dolf. It was the only writing which seemed worthwhile to her.
The war was causing a great slowing-down of transport across America. Trains ran six, seven, eight hours late, and Jan spent these hours at a standstill with pad and pen. Gasoline rationing meant that people had to share rides and forgo non-essential journeys, but despite the shortage three thousand people attended her lecture in Greenville, South Carolina, a fact which astonished her. Would nothing stop them from going to lectures? One thing the gasoline shortage did put a stop to, however, much to her relief, was the compulsory sightseeing drive the morning after.
Darling [she wrote on 16 February 1943], I managed to catch the Cincinnati Express – the station authorities at Richmond were persuaded to hold it for me! (The station-master was a Miniver fan, & had heard me speak at Loew’s Theatre last July.) So I rushed across the tracks, & clambered on to the train to find there was no food on it. However, the conductor gave me his only apple, and the Pullman porter came up to my bunk & shyly said, ‘Ah hev an orange yew could hev ef yew lakke…’ I ate them and then slept for eight hours & feel fine.
Don’t worry about me: I’m tired but at the very TOP of my form, making gorgeous speeches & writing gorgeous poetry. I can’t be unhappy when I’m in my present state of acute, starry, clear-headed but burning-hearted inner fertility. I’ve gone down to 108 lbs & am size 10 again. I feel all the time as though I’m walking – no, dancing – on air & my head is bursting with poems and ideas. Forgive my arrogance but who wouldn’t be arrogant if they had my luck? – The greatest part of which is to have been your lover for three such perfect years & to know that I am still loved by a great poet who I know is also going to be a great soldier …
Dan [Jan’s friend Dan Golenpaul, the businessman behind Information, Please!] is going to put me on Inf. Pl. at least once a month, if not oftener, as the ‘anchor’ guest on the opposite week from Oscar Levant: and as I now get $400 a time instead of $200, you can see what a difference this will make to my finances. But you know nothing changes me inside, whether it’s success or revenues, just as long as I have enough vitamins and red corpuscles. (And love. Not sex, but LOVE.) Sweet love, I adore you, & I carry round with me two of the photographs I took of you in Battersea Park just before our last agonizing farewell!
Dolf didn’t feel that he was being a great soldier. What he was experiencing for the first time in his life – like so many people new to the Army – was boredom. Jan longed for his news: for hilarious details about barrack rooms, or about any violinists he had unearthed. But Dolf could think of little to report, except which film he had seen in downtown Los Angeles during his twenty-four-hour pass. ‘Just came back from my pass, which was on the lonely side, as usual.’
From Jamie in England, too,
Jan received letters hinting at the loneliness and newslessness of the soldier. Jamie was at Pirbright Camp, having joined the Scots Guards in October 1942. Army life was too repetitive and dull to write about. The only news Jamie – like Dolf – felt inspired to give was what he had done on his leaves. There was no home to go to in London (the lease on Halsey Street had been given up, and Wellington Square was shut up, its rooms draped with dust-sheets), so he stayed in friends’ flats, and went out for solitary dinners at the Martinez in Swallow Street. For spiritual sustenance, he went to National Gallery concerts: in one letter he enclosed a programme of Schubert songs accompanied by Gerald Moore, to which he went alone on 19 April 1943. These concerts always reminded him of the one he had been to with his mother on the day before she sailed.
Both Dolf and Jamie, cut off though they were from Jan, could see her name on the screen and hear her voice on the airwaves. ‘Mrs Miniver was shown at Pirbright cinema at the weekend,’ Jamie wrote. ‘I thought Vin was awful, but it is getting a terrific reception here.’ He also heard Jan on a trans-Atlantic Brains Trust programme, broadcast from New York. Dolf sometimes tuned in to Information, Please!, just to hear Jan’s voice. And, knowing he might be listening, she secretly spoke to him, or sang to him: ‘Oh, if you listened last night I hope you got my message! There was a question – “Sing a line of a song containing the word ‘Johnnie’.” So I upped and sang, “I would give them all for my handsome winsome Johnnie”, and thought so so longingly of you while I sang.’
She was still being strong for them both. ‘The Placzek–Struther Axis is strong and we’ll lick the world yet, whether we’re in each other’s arms or not. When I’m up on a platform trying to sway an audience, you’re standing invisibly beside me saying, “Stand up straight, & let’s have a nice Joycerl smile.” And when you’re on kitchen duty peeling potatoes with hands that should be playing Mozart, then I’m beside you, saying “Hold the knife the other way, you sweet left-handed son of a bitch.”’
At about this time, though, she began to betray small hints of the exhaustion which was beginning to seep into her body and mind. Adrenalin enabled her to sail, glowing, through evenings like this one at the Weir Cove Community Women’s Club of West Virginia:
But she was finding it harder and harder to wind down after these lectures, and she was beginning to resort to sleeping-pills. Here she describes to Dolf, in one unbroken paragraph, a typical forty-eight hours of her spring 1943 lecture tour.
I was talking to people almost without a break from 10 a.m. till midnight … An autographing ‘Do’ from 2–3.15 & another from 3.15 to 4.30. Back to my hotel, where an Irish-Minnesotan guy called Kennan interviewed me (and gave me a drink). Then a rapid dressing, then dinner [with the sponsors] … Then the lecture, at which I talked to a packed theatre (2,000, I shd think) for an hour and answered questions for another half-hour … [Then she had agreed to be driven to Toledo by a stranger, Mr Hardgrove, a necessity of the gasoline shortage.] I was relieved to see that Mr Hardgrove was a kindly respectable humorous blondish ‘family man’. By the time we set off from Akron it was 12.30 a.m. & the roads were a sheet of ice, & we were running through thick white fog, with trucks suddenly looming up. But I was so utterly exhausted that I slept more than half the time. I had to ask him to stop once, so I could get out and p— in the snow, but we were neither of us in the least embarrassed. Exhaustion reduces people to complete simplicity. We finally got into Toledo at 3.45 a.m. The car doors were frozen & my eyes were gummed up with sleep. I opened them just long enough to check in & get to my room & then collapsed into bed, hoping to sleep till 9. But my blasted mental alarm-clock woke me at 7.15. Then at 9.30 a visit to Edna Rowe’s school – and the heartrending experience of being presented with a flower-posy by a boy called Chuck (four years old), who was born blind & is terribly cross-eyed & very ugly & very sweet, while the press photographer struggled to get a picture of the ceremony without showing Chuck’s eyes. Chuck kept stroking me and snuggling up to me but turning his face to the camera, & I had to keep trying to get him to turn the right way without saying anything obvious. And the photographer kept saying ‘You just keep right on smiling and talking, Miss Struther.’ ‘Keep smiling’ – my God, I wanted to cry all the time … I managed not to cry during that, but when the singing class of the school began singing ‘London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady’ which is for me the quintessence of Heimweh, I’m afraid I pretty well broke down. Not in their sight, but in Miss Rowe’s office … [That same evening, she gave another lecture, to 1,000 people.] I spoke for one and a half hours to an absolutely tops audience … I think I had more applause here than I’ve ever had before – maybe my technique is improving; I know I stand more still & speak more flowingly than I used to. Then half an hour of questions (good ones, too, giving lots of opportunities for stories & wisecracks & sly digs at U.S. class distinctions, etc.) Then a biggish party at a ‘Byoodiful Home’, where I drank punch and was forced by Edna Rowe to read some of my poems … I went back to my hotel at 12.45 and thought, Now the Day is Over … But the telephone rang … It was Harold [Harley, Editor of the Toledo Times], asking if I’d like to come over to his room and have a nightcap. So I said I’d come for 10 minutes. I went, & stayed till 3 a.m., lying on a sofa & discussing poetry, philosophy, medicine, psychology, love – with particular reference to his love life, not mine … To bed at 3.15, took a sleeping-pill (which I hadn’t for several nights) and planned to sleep till noon. I need hardly tell you that I woke up at 8.30. I am a little tired. (Department of British Understatement.)
One of the poems she read out at the ‘byoodiful home’ was a ballad she had just written, ‘The American Way of Life’:
I met an old man
The other day:
His eyes were small
And sharp and grey;
His paunch was fat
And his lips were thin,
And his cheeks were as dry
As a rattler’s skin.
And all the time
As he talked and ate,
In went victuals
And out came hate.
Like a burst of hail,
Like a creek in spate –
His own particular
Hymn of Hate.
‘I don’t know whether
You share my views,
But it makes me mad
When I read the news.
Helping the Russians
And helping the Jews …
Rationing sugar
And rationing shoes …
All these orders
And all these bans,
Cutting out coupons,
And counting cans.
Oh, I know – the war …
And I know – Lease-Lend …
But where is the whole thing
Going to end?
I view with fear
And deep misgiving
This change for the worse
In our manner of living:
In fact, as I frequently say to my wife,
We’re in danger of losing our own way of life –
Our own,
Known,
Sure,
Secure,
Great American way of life.’
Said I to him,
‘Well, that may be.
I’m only a guest
From across the sea,
And I’ve only been here
Two years or three;
But this is the way
It seems to me.
‘The men who founded
And built this land –
They didn’t do it
On food that was canned,
But on home-made broth,
And home-cooked hash
And hominy grits
And succotash.
The men who trudged
Through Cumberland Gap
Wore buckskin boots
And a coonskin cap;
And the men who crossed
The Great Div
ide,
They slept rolled up
In buffalo hide.
The things they owned
Were simple and few;
They used them well
And they made them do.
They made their own songs,
And they loved to sing ’em;
They thought their wives
Looked fine in gingham;
And though they ached
From their own day’s labours,
They were never too tired
To help their neighbours.
They’d strength in their arms
And breadth in their backs;
They won this land
With rifle and axe,
They followed their stars
And they earned their stripes,
And they didn’t have time
For groans and gripes.
‘Now I’ve travelled this land
Two years or three;
I love it next
To my own countree;
And from what I hear,
And from what I see,
This is the way
It seems to me:
‘Something was lost –
Not lost but hidden,
Like a sleeping hound
That wakes when it’s bidden;
But out of this danger and out of this strife
Is springing afresh your own way of life –
The plain,
Sane,