The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  She steeled herself against ‘the expected thrust in the vitals’, as she called it: the letter from Dolf which would inevitably follow, explaining that he had taken the sensible decision, and had found a charming girl, not blonde, a pianist actually, twenty-seven years old, interested in architecture …

  Jan with Robert’s cairn Culi, in 1945

  But it wasn’t a letter, it was a cable. And its message made Jan ‘melt with zärtlichkeit’. She wrote straight back to him, her longest letter ever – thirty-six pages. ‘My darling darling sweet love…’

  It seemed to me almost impossible that you should still be ‘uninvolved and unchanged’ after all my long silence & our intolerable separation. Oh, Liebstes, Liebstes, how wonderful that you still feel the same.

  … The long and the short of it is that life in these circumstances is impossible. It is not life at all, but a limbo, a half-animal existence – no, not as warm as that. It cannot last. I am neither truly domestic nor creative, & I can’t sleep, & I can’t write, & I can’t thaw out at all except with very old friends (and ex-’Friends’ who are now friends only).

  She described the months since sailing from Halifax: the stormy Atlantic crossing, the terrible holiday in Scotland, the exhausting cleaning of Wellington Square, and she brought Dolf up to date, showing him how the war had polarized Tony and her:

  It became increasingly clear [in Scotland] that what he was finding it impossible to control was the fact that he is once more, & even more than before, madly irritated by my whole personality, voice, outlook & presence. In theory he is ‘very fond of me’, ‘couldn’t possibly dislike me’, & other similar half-compliments which are more wounding than any insults. We have arrived at a sort of modus vivendi which consists of my keeping out of his way as much as possible and watching every word & gesture when I am alone with him so as not to madden him. He doesn’t irritate me, except very occasionally (mostly when he’s trying to do something practical in the way of carpentry etc., and being both clumsy and pigheaded about it). He simply stultifies and nullifies and sterilizes me. The worst thing of all is his inability or unwillingness to discuss any of our joint problems, until they’re so far gone as to be almost insoluble …

  Almost everybody I know is in the same state, if that’s any consolation. A wise woman writer has suggested that there should be a moratorium on all marriages, owing to the war, & that any 2 people who want to re-marry should do so. The housing shortage is appalling. The latest Gallup poll says that 1 adult in 3 is trying to find different accommodation. We have turned into a nomadic nation.

  Tony and Jan’s friends kept saying to them, ‘Aren’t you two lucky to have this lovely house to come back to!’ (‘And the sword turns in the wound again.’) The house was, in fact, ‘an ice-house’. The drawing-room was coldly tidy and unlived-in, the fire lit only when visitors came. Tony, when he was at home, spent most of the time in his upstairs bed-sitting-room, the room in which Robert had been born. Jan spent most of the time in her bed-sitter studio (‘a heavenly room, in which one could be so happy’). Janet found the atmosphere in the house so unbearable that she bought a Baby Belling and lived independently in her bedroom when she was not out at her business course. Robert was away at Stowe, and Jamie had still not returned from Yugoslavia. Nannie was the only binding presence: she lived on the top floor and was out at work all day, ‘but thank God she is here most nights for supper & provides a diversion & a link for the 3 of us.’

  Longing to touch bits of London which reminded her of Dolf, Jan visited Mme Luhn, the landlady at 100 Denbigh Street who had called him down to the telephone that evening in November 1939. There she was, and her pot au feu was still simmering on the stove. Jan walked westwards along the river and knocked on the door of 113 Cheyne Walk, the place of assignations, where she and Dolf had heard tugs hooting and the evening-newspaper seller shouting of Nazi advances as they lay together postponing the moment of parting. Jan’s friend Charles Spencer opened the door. ‘You wouldn’t possibly have a room to let, would you?’ Jan asked him. ‘I have, actually,’ he said. ‘Not the one you used in 1940 – the one just across across the hall.’

  Jan took it, cheaply. She now had a bolt-hole from the ‘ice-house’. But nothing could stop ‘the Jungles’ coming back, which they did, soon after she had finished writing the November letter to Dolf. Until then, the busyness of getting the house in order had kept depression away, and had prevented her from facing up to her creative sterility. But now ‘the Jungles’ were worse than ever: she found herself beset by irrational as well as rational glooms, and was caught once again in the vicious circle of illness and unhappiness interacting and making each other worse. Her doctor treated her for anaemia, low blood-pressure, and change-of-life depressions, and every night for two months she took sleeping-pills, which had, as she later described it, ‘a devastating effect’.

  Just before Christmas, Jamie came home. The fire was lit in the drawing-room. With Robert home for the holidays and the family reunited, it looked on the surface (for a few days) almost as if the Minivers had come back to life. Jamie played Meccano with Robert, and Robert was thrilled to rediscover the older brother he had not seen for five and a half years. But Jan, still in her ‘Jungles’, felt like an outsider, watching the family party through a window. At the end of the Christmas holidays the boys went away again. Emerging in the New Year from the worst of the ‘hell’ – enough, at least, to be able to write a letter – Jan wrote to Dolf on 17 January 1946, her fingers stiff and cold because of the fuel shortage:

  I have lost all joy & gaiety, & there is hardly anybody here I really give a damn about. I don’t see how I can go on existing like this, in this hell of nothingness. And yet, when I try to face the alternative, of splitting up and busting things up for Rob, I just can’t bear the prospect of it. It wouldn’t be so bad for Janet, who is practically on her own anyway, but she does need a ‘background’ of some kind when she’s just beginning to go to dances, & I feel that even an only apparently united home is better than none.

  Perhaps Jan remembered from her own childhood that, awful though it had been having parents who were icily polite to one another, having separated parents who were openly hostile to one another and nowhere one could truly call ‘home’ had been even worse.

  I see no immediate prospect of coming to America, and when I shall see you again God only knows – unless some miracle happens & our star lights up again. It is so very, very faint now, Liebes, that I can hardly see it twinkling at all. Was it all a dream, our happiness, & did we really once exist, and be together, and laugh & have fun? I feel more and more unreal, and more and more entrapped in the cast of some play where I don’t belong. The only real thing here is Robert, with his shining intelligent eyes & his loving heart.

  It was difficult, in the immediate post-war period, to get an exit permit for America unless you were going on Government business, or to do something which would help the dollar exchange. Clark Getts, the lecture agents who had ruled Jan’s working life during the war years, were clamouring for her to come back and embark on another tour. If she accepted, she would almost certainly be able to ‘swing it’, as she put it, and get a passage. But she couldn’t bring herself to take it on. The tiringness and loneliness of the last one still haunted her. She was determined to stay out of Clark Getts’s clutches.

  Her sense of isolation was compounded by the ‘unintimacy’ which had developed between her and Janet. But at last, in early 1946, they had a frank talk. Janet told her mother why she was feeling miserable and uncommunicative: she not only hated the atmosphere of the house and the dreariness of post-war England, but she was missing her friends, and pining for Thomi, and saw no way of getting back to America. Jan’s heart melted at this, because it was so much the same story as her own. She told Janet about her love for Dolf – though she did not confess that the affair had been going on for six years. Janet was amazed – shocked – worried – delighted – she loved and admired Dolf – but what would
be the outcome?

  The ‘star’ was fainter than Jan knew. During those two months of silence, between November 1945 and January 1946, while she was deep in the ‘Jungles’ and not writing to Dolf, he was stationed in Indiana on his last stint in the Army before being discharged in March 1946. And there, on leave in Indianapolis, he met ‘l’Indianapolitaine’ or ‘the Indiana Compromise’, as Jan later called her: a blonde, aged twenty-two, full of physical attraction, and irresistible.

  The letter in which he confessed this has not survived, but from Jan’s reaction it seems that Dolf played it down: she was bold enough to say (after admitting that the news was ‘agony’), ‘I know that no relationship that you or I will ever have with anybody else could ever be in the same street with yours or mine.’ Her method – just as in the infidelity-imagining letter of 1944 – was to draw on the depth of the relationship between her and Dolf, and to brush aside any others as shallow and not worthy of discussion. All she needed to be sure of, she said, was that the visit to New York she was planning for the publication of A Pocketful of Pebbles (which had been postponed till the summer) would not coincide with a ‘visit from Indianapolis’.

  She was not certain of the journey to America: her application to the Department of Overseas Trade (‘My publishers want me to be there to promote sales by means of personal appearances’) had not yet been accepted. ‘I guess you feel the same about it as I do,’ she wrote to Dolf on 8 April, ‘– a big longing combined with a small dread, because it’s only, so to speak, another “furlough”, & must lead to another separation.’

  But the very prospect of seeing Dolf, now a civilian again, and back working at the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia, and of being once again the centre of attention at book-signings, rekindled her ‘Winstonian’ energies. She dared to get in touch with the BBC, and was welcomed with rapture. ‘I’ve been on the air quite a lot,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘transatlantic quizzes, & reading my own poetry on the North American Service. It’s unspeakably relieving to be coming out of that bloody jungle at last: I’ve never lived through such hell as this winter has been, and I hope I never shall again.’

  The Department of Overseas Trade said ‘Yes’. She could go. Delighted, she wrote to Frank Morley of Harcourt Brace telling him she would be in New York for publication day. Her letter crossed with one from Dolf telling her that her visit would coincide exactly with the ‘visit from Indianapolis’. It was, she wrote back to him, ‘the most damnable tangle.’

  I could not endure to be in NY while she was there – it would be intolerable for all 3 of us. So I must just postpone my visit. Difficult, because the whole point was to be there on the day of publication, not 3 weeks later. I’ve written to Frank Morley to say ‘owing to further family complications’ I now won’t be able to arrive until the end of June. God knows what he’ll think. Oh, damn, damn, damn … what a mess! I can’t help seeing, in a detached way, how grimly funny it is in its way.

  Once again, she braced herself for the inevitable letter in which Dolf would advise her not to come to New York at all, because he was going to marry ‘l’Indianapolitaine’ and had been trying to break it to her gently. His letter arrived. She didn’t dare to open the envelope, but sat looking at it and feeling sick.

  … And then when I finally summoned up enough guts to read it, it was like a sweet balm pouring all over me, & I felt (for the first time in months) warmed right through & not lonely any more.

  You’re right, Liebes. Involvements are more trouble & anguish than they are worth. Even real love brings enough anguish, God knows, in a world like this, all full of Displaced Persons – but real love is worth it, every time.

  It was to the poor girl from Indianapolis that Dolf had to break news gently. Her last words to him were, ‘My dearest wish is that someone would love me as much as you love that woman.’

  * * *

  ‘Oh darling honey Liebes Du – I am really & truly, wirklich und warhäftig, coming!’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 27 May. She had a seat booked on an aeroplane, the Flying Dutchman. ‘I’m arriving on 29 June & can stay till 2 Aug. when I must get back for Robbie’s holidays.’ She planned to rent an apartment so she wouldn’t feel ‘alien & visitorish’ in a hotel.

  The Dutch Airlines publicity dept. has rung me to say that reporters will be waiting for me at La Guardia – so for God’s sake don’t meet me, because it would be simple hell not to run into your arms. Besides, I’ll probably faint dead away with sheer joy when I see you, which would be most awkward if done in public. I’ll ring you up as soon as I get to a telephone, & then I’ll come right over to your apt. & stand on the exact spot on the floor where I said goodbye to you 14 months ago (or 14 million years, or 14 minutes, whichever way you choose to think of it).

  Ask Pauly to get in 6 dozen oranges, please. I shall drink a gallon a day at first, I expect.

  The face lit up by the photographers’ flashes at La Guardia was thinner and more careworn than the one which had sailed away fourteen months before, and the hair was greyer. But the eyes which greeted Dolf were unchanged. The poem Jan had written to him in 1940 in her schoolgirl German still held true:

  Staatenlos, heimatlos

  Gehen wir immer,

  Staatenlos, schwer zu sein,

  Heimatlos, schlimmer.

  Staatenlos? Heimatlos?

  Nein, liebes, nein,

  Weil du mein Heimat bist,

  Und ich bin dein.2

  Chapter Fifteen

  I am a captive in a cobweb’s mesh;

  Frail is its tracery, yet I cannot stir;

  Fast as I tear the strands, they grow afresh

  And hold me here with you, a prisoner:

  Habit, long musty, set in instinct’s place,

  Pale duty, and a maze of trivial ties,

  And craven kindness – since I am loathe to face

  Your wounded and uncomprehending eyes.

  Steel chains might yet be snapped, and I be free:

  But O! these clinging cobwebs strangle me.

  From ‘Cobwebs’, in Betsinda Dances

  ‘THAT WAS A wonderful, heavenly 38 days’ leave,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on the aeroplane back to Britain on 7 August 1946. ‘It got happier and happier, and all the jungles & bitched-upness that we’d both been going through got smoothed out, like a rumpled sheet in the wake of an iron. We’re both of us so difficult for other people (it seems) and so unrestful and temperamental – and yet for each other we are perfect – so easy, so restful, and so constant.’

  ‘It got happier and happier’ suggests that it was less than happy to begin with. Exhausted after the nomadic years of war, hardened by fourteen unfulfilling months apart, bewildered by one another’s recent efforts at infidelity, they now had to embark on yet another existence, this time with Jan as short-term visitor and Dolf as resident, employed citizen. But gradually during these thirty-eight days of readjustment, as the ‘bitched-upness’ faded, Jan emerged from confusion into a state of clarity about her parallel lives.

  The time had come, she decided, when she must free herself from the strangling cobwebs of her marriage. Evenings with Dolf, home from the Avery Library in her rented apartment on East 70th Street, gave her a glimpse of possibilities which made a resumption of life in Wellington Square intolerable, even absurd. It would mean going back to the strain of acting a part for which she was miscast, after tasting the ease of naturalness.

  During the war, the thought of breaking up her marriage had been almost unthinkable: Jan had shuddered at the violence of its effect. It would have undermined her whole ‘Mrs Miniver’ persona, vital as Allied propaganda, and destroyed her reputation. It would have been cruel to Tony in his prisoner-of-war camp, and unsettling for the already unsettled children. But now, the pressure to maintain an outward show of marriedness had eased. She was no longer the professional ‘happily married woman’, so fearful of scandal that she fled from a hotel in O’Neill, Nebraska just because someone recognized her voice in a washroom. Tony was a
civilian, and her youngest child was now aged fifteen. The sheer boredom and spiritual sterility of living with Tony, day after day, month after month, had taken the sting out of any decision to part. No one could say they hadn’t tried. It seemed now that the choice was obvious, between what was natural and what was artificial. For years she had clung, privately, to the guilt-inducing state of ‘having her cake and eating it’ – to the stability of an upper-class marriage and the excitement of an affair – and this, she knew, would be hard to give up. She was keenly aware of the pain she would inflict by breaking up the ‘family pattern’, but there was now an overwhelming sense of inevitability that this must happen. She would have to take the consequences.

  Having put her personal life above her career by postponing her trip to New York until three weeks after the publication of A Pocketful of Pebbles in May 1946, she could hardly be surprised that the book began to sink without trace. It was a patched-together and plainly produced collection of her poems, fables and wartime lectures, plus the pre-war Try Anything Twice – a compendium of fifteen years of her wit and wisdom, full of good stuff, but out of date and lacking unity. There was no introduction, and no guiding voice to carry the reader from the pre-war to the wartime frame of mind. The New York Times gave it a bad review, and it produced only a trickle of royalties. The title, chosen by Jan, did not help. Without the magic word ‘Miniver’ (Jan forbade the inclusion of the dreaded name) it meant nothing to most people. The book’s luke-warm reception dented her writer’s confidence, already low. She realized she would have to produce powerful, and fresh, material if she was ever to be a bestselling author again.