The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  He had found, among ‘the buddies’, a confidant whom he told about his love affair with an English married woman. Jan’s reaction to this information revealed how sensitive she still was about her reasons for coming to the United States in 1940: ‘I know it sounds more romantic and simple, the way you put it to him, but don’t you see that it isn’t fair on me to imply that I left GB just at that crucial moment simply and solely to be with you? I didn’t, as you know: if the children hadn’t been coming I’d just have had to stick it out and mend my heart with Scotch tape or something. So please revise that version before I come – otherwise, I promise you, I shall get hold of him and do it myself.’

  For Mrs Miniver, and for Jan in her early marriage, privacy and free time had been two of the most cherished privileges. In ‘Mrs Miniver and the New Car’ she had quoted the Chinese proverb, ‘To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal.’ But now, in late 1943, she dreaded solitude, and feared the emptiness of being ‘at leisure’. The woman who had once made sure there was a permanent nannie between herself and her younger children now dreaded them going back to boarding school. This was another symptom of her depression. If there was nobody in the apartment with her, she was paralysed with loneliness. Pauly came and spent the night with her often, to keep her company: they were brought together by both missing Dolf. ‘Ich weiss wie tief dankbar ich sein muss,’ Pauly wrote to Dolf in 1943, ‘und ich darf bestimmt nicht klagen, aber ich bin oft so schrecklich allein.’ (She ended the letter, ‘Wirst Du nie fotografiert von den Buddies?’)1 But Pauly now had a job as a paid ‘lady companion’ to a wealthy American lesbian, Miss Frank, and had to travel with her wherever she went. Jan’s secretary Anne Curtis Brown had left, to get married.

  ‘I miss Anne dreadfully,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 22 October 1943.

  It was lovely to feel that she would be turning up every morning – moody as the devil, but human. The early mornings are the worst. Gracie comes at 10.30. Pauly (when she sleeps here) leaves at 8.30. Those two hours, especially after a bad night, are purgatory. I don’t know what we can do, darling, except wish on our star and wait. The Russian (& other) news is marvellous, & that’s what we ought to fix our minds on. Hell, when people are being killed all over the world, & nine lovers & sweethearts out of ten are being separated, the fate of two scraps of humanity like us ought to seem insignificant. But oh God! how it hurts. If everybody – I mean all lovers – who are torn apart like this are feeling as we do, the world seems too small to carry such a load of exquisite misery. I know we have no right to think of ourselves as exceptions – it’s only that most of them can at least look forward to some focal point in the future when they can take up their lives together again, whereas we – but what’s the use of going into all that again every time I write …

  This was an eighteen-page letter, and it ended: ‘Darling, I’ve just made myself a dry Martini, & I’m lying on the bed drinking it. As it penetrates down to my fingertips & up to my braincells, I find I can almost imagine us happy again one day, & falling asleep in each other’s arms with nothing more formidable than an alarm-clock for the next morning. Sweet, foolish, heavenly dream … I’ll cling to it while I can.’

  Pauly, when she stayed with Jan, went downstairs each morning to collect the mail. If there was a letter from Dolf, she woke Jan; if there wasn’t, she let her sleep on. Jan read the letters aloud, leaving out the private bits and the bits which might worry Pauly. On 23 October she had to leave nearly everything out. ‘There is a chance that I might be sent overseas,’ Dolf had written.

  ‘Please don’t even mention the overseas idea to me at present,’ she wrote back. ‘I am not strong enough to stand it.’ Her thoughts were ‘going round and round like chipmunks in a cage’ – and the only way to regain any peace of mind, she realized, was to countermand the cancellation of the second half of the autumn lecture tour. At Jan’s request, Clark Getts had arranged for her to be in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving, after giving four lectures in Illinois, two in Texas, two in Oklahoma, two in Washington state, and three in northern California. ‘Darling, I am on my way to you,’ she wrote on 7 November, ‘travelling in a slow and rather cold train through an illimitable waste of snowy prairie. I am sitting with a nice Pittsburgh housewife who is on her way to Seattle to see her husband (an Army doctor) for a little while before he goes overseas. She has 3 small children at home & can’t therefore do war-work to take her mind off things. She is obviously miserable. Just one more of the millions of torn-apart and disembowelled…’

  In her engagement book, the inch-deep space for Thanksgiving Day has a diagonal mark across the top left-hand corner: her secret sign. The Clark Getts Details of Engagement say: ‘We presume you have your own plans for accommodation in Los Angeles.’ She and Dolf stayed at the Biltmore, for three nights. By 2 December she was lecturing at Houston, Texas, and she would not be able to see Dolf again until his furlough, which could be months away.

  Her lectures, she felt, could do with rejuvenating. She needed new material, first-hand, up-to-date information about wartime civilian life in Britain. She made an application for a two-way passage. Surely she would have priority, with the excuse of ‘collecting material for British publicity in the US.’ She dared to dream about it: and, having started to dream, she let herself go. She would see Jamie again, and small fields, and beloved London! Homesickness overwhelmed her, and she was now as set on returning to Britain as she had been on leaving four years before.

  But her plan was constantly foiled. Later in December, a fibroid was found in her womb (‘apparently innocent,’ she wrote to Tony’s sister Ysenda, ‘but obstructive, so that I am absolutely crippled with pains for the four or five days when I have the curse, and have to stay in bed with my knees doubled up, feeling as though I’m giving birth to twins’). Then the British Information Service told her there was a long list of essential people trying to get to Britain, and she would have to wait some months. ‘I expected to have left by now,’ she wrote to Dolf on 2 March 1944, ‘but it seems it may be another couple of weeks at least. I feel discouraged and on edge.’ She could not get to sleep without a sleeping-pill or a drink. ‘DON’T call me “a brave girl”, sweetheart. I am not brave, & you know it. My only strength is that I do not fear death any more – only injury, and sea-sickness, and lecture audiences, and going home to a Heimat which will be stranger than any strange land.’

  Then news came from England that Jamie, having injured his leg on a training exercise, was in an Army hospital with haemorrhoids. And she still had no definite date for leaving. ‘You can imagine my present state of mind,’ she wrote to Dolf on 20 March. ‘The suspense of this journey business is awful. In addition, everything else has been going wrong at once – financial worries about income tax, Getts chivvying me about lectures, and, underlying everything, my ever-present sadness at being separated from you with oh! so little hope of seeing you again till God knows when … I saw two letters from Tony in the mailbox yesterday at long last – but when I looked at them I saw that one was 7 months old, from Italy, & the other (a postcard) 5 months old from the German transit camp. Oh dear, it’s so hard to keep in touch with people when the news one gets is so stale. The postcard sounded very depressed (for him).’

  In the course of the Allied liberation of Italy, some prisoners-of-war had been released to make their own hazardous way to the Allied lines. But Tony had been among the less fortunate ones who were sent on in closed cattle trucks to Germany, by way of transit camps in Central Europe. ‘You may imagine my disappointment at finding myself here,’ he had written to Jamie from Stalag VIIA in southern Germany on 8 October 1943. His postcard could not say more.

  By 16 April 1944, Jan’s journey to England was definitely off. ‘Nothing can make the Home Office give any guarantee of my being able to get back here again,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘especially with things being about to pop (invasion etc.) & I simply cannot risk getting myself stranded there & the children stranded here �
� I feel desperately disappointed on Jamie’s behalf. For myself, I feel ghastlily disappointed at not seeing him. I feel like a snapped string, and I have now no focal point to look forward to.’

  I have forgotten even the smell of happiness –

  As one who has been many months at sea

  Forgets the scent of grass on summer evenings.

  I remember only that it was sweet, and lifted the heart.

  One of these days, perhaps, there will be landfall,

  And I shall smell it again, and my heart be lifted.

  But for now there is nothing except the bitter salt,

  Day after day after day.

  While she was working on this poem, called ‘At Sea’, in the black fortnight after the final cancellation of her plans to return to England, Dolf sent her one in German he had just written, about being in a strange sun-land where there was no rain, and no sweet smell of grass in the evening. It was another of their poetic coincidences. ‘Oh, darling,’ Jan wrote back, ‘I try so hard to orientate myself away from the life which you have been the centre of for so long: I think I am making headway – and then suddenly a poem of yours strikes me right to the heart and makes me realise how absolutely “one river” we are.’

  * * *

  A period of ‘Schneeschmeltzen’ – the thawing of Jan’s iced-up spirit – followed in April, with the help of Dr Pardee, a neurologist with whom she sat for many hours, talking things out. He told her she was going through a kind of battle fatigue as a result of trying to deal with insoluble problems until her brain was exhausted and congested. He could not solve the problems, but he at least clarified what was happening, and this shaft of light tipped Jan in the other direction, from depression to a new kind of high – elation spiced with dottiness. She dashed off poems every day – ‘A poem a day keeps the doctor away’:

  I’ll never see, where’er I roam,

  A tree as lovely as a pome.

  A tree is just a thing that growed –

  But only man can make an ode.

  She and Dolf were frank, in their letters, about their ‘randiness’. ‘When I’m in camp I don’t miss sex so much,’ Dolf wrote, ‘but as soon as I get out and especially after catching up on my sleep, it bothers me – not enough, though, to get into the gutter. What I really miss is LOVE – the whole thing, the physical and mental.’ Jan was having calcium injections and had discovered that they ‘reduced local desire in other parts of the body’. ‘This is a major discovery,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘though rather comic in a way. I never knew about it before, because it is so many years since I have been sex-starved (awful word).’

  They were both aware of the possibility of the other ‘getting involved with’ somebody else. ‘Are you?’ Dolf wrote. ‘No, sweetheart, I am NOT,’ Jan replied. ‘Temptations are many & strong because I’m meeting so many fascinating people – but (a) I’m too physically tired to be very randy very often & (b) I love you too much. This is not a promise – we neither of us made a promise – but only a statement of fact.’

  Dolf had every reason to fret: Jan was meeting lots of attractive, eminent men, the very fact of her affair with him proved her capable of infidelity, and she did have crushes. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t the least letch on Morris Ernst [President Roosevelt’s personal representative on missions to England],’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘I had for about 2 days, but got over it when I’d lunched with him for the 3rd time & seen his handwriting in a notebook.’ (Amateur graphology was one of the dozens of subjects which fascinated her.) She was great friends with the singer Paul Robeson, crush material even though he was married (and it was Janet, not Jan, on whom Paul Robeson turned his seductive charms). Dolf hardly met any women from one year’s end to the next, but Jan still felt jealous. She used the expression ‘a blonde’ to describe the kind of woman Dolf might be tempted go to bed with: someone of great superficial physical attraction, but not much brain. It was a cunningly derogatory term, designed to make Dolf feel ashamed if he did succumb to such a person’s charms. It became one of their private comic words; but underneath the comedy there was genuine fear on Jan’s part. When she saw ‘a blonde’ in her imagination, it was always somebody young, with bouncy hair and a bronzed West Coast complexion. Dolf was thirty, she was forty-three. Her own hair was becoming silver-flecked, and she occasionally caught sight of a double chin in a right-angled mirror. (She had recently sent Dolf a funny photograph of herself looking donnish and double-chinned in a mortarboard while being awarded an honorary degree by the University of Pennsylvania.) It was a sign of the shifting balance of power in their relationship that she felt the more insecure.

  She telephoned Dolf one morning and he was short with her. He didn’t say, ‘Is that you, darling?’ but ‘Is that New York?’ Feeling sick with foreboding, she wrote to him.

  The possibilities, as near as I can figure them out, are these:

  1 You were desperately sleepy and early-morning-new-born-kittenish, and couldn’t rouse yourself to talk much. OR

  2 You were feeling really sick, either in the stomach or in the head. OR

  3 You were feeling depressed about the boringness and smallness of your job, and longing to get overseas or at any rate into something more interesting. OR

  4 You weren’t alone, and therefore couldn’t speak freely. This again splits up into various possibilities, viz:

  5 You were sharing a room with another GI, owing to space shortage. OR

  6 You were sharing the room with a GI blonde. OR

  7 You were sharing the room with Janie [a married acquaintance, in whose house Dolf sometimes spent the night on his leaves]. OR

  8 You were sharing the room with somebody else, not a GI blonde, but some other, new, ‘real’ person.

  She made herself face and analyse each of these possibilities in turn. It was an utterly un-‘blonde’ letter, drawing on their deeper-than-physical bond of words and candour. It was an exercise in preparing for an end with Dolf, whenever it might come. This was how she dealt with the final three possibilities:

  6 I want you to know, darling, that I don’t mind in the very least. I know what you must have been going through about sex, partly because I’ve been going through it myself. I don’t want to risk getting emotionally involved with anybody, so I stick to Miss Bates. But, as you know, if it were possible for a woman to go to a convenient and hygienic brothel, or to pick up the equivalent of a GI blonde, I would do so at the drop of a hat (or should I say at the rise of a clitoris?) So that’s that. I wish circumstances were not such as to make it necessary, but seeing that they are, and seeing that you are so heavenlily, heavenlily highly sexed (thank God) – well, as I said, don’t worry.

  7 I also don’t mind, sweetheart. I expected something of the kind to happen in that quarter, and I have had a feeling for some time that something has. Partly because you don’t seem to go there as often as you used to, and partly because you don’t mention her in your letters any more … Maybe you fell in love (or started to) with her and felt you oughtn’t to go there any more because of [Janie’s husband] Ted: or maybe you just both felt that electric something growing up in the air between you, and agreed that you’d better not meet. Or perhaps you both fell in love, or in lust, and you are meeting. Well, you needn’t feel badly about it, if this is so.

  8 Well, that’s the worst of the possibilities, I admit, and when I thought that one out I did have a quarter of an hour of fairly acute pangs: but even that I managed to digest after a while, and get the sting out of it, by reflecting that you and I are no longer just ‘you’ and ‘I’. We have been mixed up with each other so long and so sweetly and so intimately that from now to the end of our lives we shall be part of each other: therefore I shall always share in any loveliness you have, and you will share in mine. It is only by thinking oneself into this frame of mind that one can overcome or transmute jealousy. It is not easy, but it can be done, and genuinely, if one’s love is deep enough.

  Well, there, as they say, the case
rests, until I hear from you. All I implore, darling heart, is that you tell me the truth. For the sake of everything we’ve been to each other in mind and body; and for the sake of Mozart and Donne and Shakespeare and Goethe and Placzek and Struther and all the other poets and musicians alive or dead; and for the sake of all the beauty that our love for each other has helped us to discern and enjoy – PLEASE write soon and truthfully.

  It turned out that Dolf had simply been sharing his room with a GI from Alabama, ‘a lazy son-of-a-bitch who wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom while I was talking (any Viennese would have).’ ‘Oh, blessed, blessed possibility five!’ wrote Jan. ‘How I love him, the fat slob. I could kiss him on his solid southern arse.’

  * * *

  In her new state of elation-after-depression, Jan turned her apartment at 214 Central Park South into a busy haven of helpers, friends, children and eccentric pets. ‘If you knew what life has been like for the last 3 weeks,’ she wrote to Dolf on 2 August. ‘I’ve only been able to get scrappy help so I’ve been cooking and cleaning and looking after Robert’s livestock (1 snake, 1 baby alligator, 2 turtles & 3 salamanders), & training Margie (the new secretary), and giving the baby its bottle & changing its diapers & I don’t know WHAT all. Oh, I forgot, you don’t know about the baby. She is called Barbara & is COAL black & very sweet. She belongs to the temporary maid (Rose) whom I captured in Harlem 2 weeks ago when I went up & raided the Slave Coast in despair. It’s simply heavenly having a baby around again…’

  Jan could say deliberately provocative things like ‘raided the Slave Coast’ because she had a genuine love of black people. She craved their company. She and her black maids had coffee round the table each morning (not at all the done thing in 1940s New York), and this was not a mere patronizing gesture. There was real unselfconscious friendship. She would have despised the ‘politically correct’ people of half a century later who refused to ask for ‘black’ coffee but never had black friends in the same way as they had white friends.