The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  * * *

  His fears were not unfounded. Arriving back on 17 September in New York (where her first intention, as she forewarned Dolf, was to ‘plunge into bed with you and merge my body and soul with yours’), Jan found that she had again lost the knack and the discipline of writing. Dolf had been promoted at Avery: he was now Assistant Librarian, helping to make decisions about important acquisitions for the library, and his hours were slightly longer than before. Jan railed against his responsible diligence. Her destiny, she still believed, was to set him free from the ‘mouldy (literally) library’ – but she was aware that his small monthly pay-cheque was for the time being their chief source of income, and that they needed it to pay the rent. She felt lost without him during the daytime: her terror of being alone had returned. In a poem she described the thoughts of a dependent wife:

  I love three sounds within the house –

  The ticking of the clock,

  And the singing of the kettle,

  And the sound of his key in the lock.

  Partly, she was afflicted by the disinclination to write which almost all writers are familiar with: the feeling that any household job is preferable to facing a blank sheet of paper. Her prowess with odd jobs made temptation all the stronger. ‘If I went home,’ she wrote later, describing the experience of writer’s block, ‘the nail-holes in the plaster would stare at me, gaping for speckle as fledglings gape for worms; and the buttons would regard me with round accusing eyes, implying that they couldn’t be blamed for not doing their duty if they were not given the proper conditions to work in. Children can be reproachful, animals even more so, but there is nothing to touch the martyred unctuousness of inanimate objects in need of attention.’

  But the problem went deeper than this. Bennes Mardenn, who remembers every day with Jan as if it were yesterday, recalls that during the autumn of 1948 Jan showed him the chapter from her manuscript in which the young Joyce saw the parents of her friend Kathleen Gascoigne having a mock-quarrel, before the father picked up the mother and carried her out of the schoolroom, laughing and talking. ‘Jan wept when she showed me that. It brought up too much. Her love for her mother and father, and their loathing for each other, tore her apart.’ In the hay-loft in Scotland, detached from her own worries, she had mustered the inner strength to tackle the emotive subject of her childhood; but now, back at her own desk amid the paperwork of divorce and exile, she could no longer think clearly. ‘The stress on her mind [Jamie wrote later] inhibited her from reliving her childhood accurately enough to commit it to paper.’

  ‘She walked with the palms of her hands out,’ Bennes remembers, ‘– the defenceless walk. I have not seen that before or since.’ Her frailty touched him deeply. She asked him if he would mind coming to sit quietly in the apartment with her during the daytime, getting on with his work in another room. He did this. When he didn’t have anything to do, he brought pretend work. In this way, avoiding solitude, Bennes overlapping with Pauly and Pauly overlapping with Dolf, Jan tried to stave off despair. But it came. She fell headlong into the worst depression she had yet experienced. All the joy of the past year – impromptu music-making at Alexander Place, inspired broadcasting, suddenly-flowing writing, poaching in the Borders – turned out to have been the exaggerated bright side of a condition which inevitably revealed its equally exaggerated dark side. And when you were in the dark side of the cycle, the bright side seemed illusory.

  But how could she be depressed, when she was married to Dolf? Wasn’t this what she had longed for, and pinned her hopes on? The quotation from Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman is apposite – ‘There are only two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.’ The final hurdle in the journey to happiness had been crossed, but she still felt like a ‘divided wretch’. Contentment and inner peace still eluded her, and there was no one left to blame but herself.

  Was it the case that marriage to Dolf was an anti-climax after nine years of illicitness? Did their love dwindle slightly, in the daily drudgery of buying and cooking veal shanks and washing up the saucepans afterwards? It did not dwindle, Dolf has claimed, vehemently, and all the evidence in Jan’s later diaries and letters bears him out. Their love remained as strong as ever after marriage, and continued to grow deeper by the day.

  There was depression in the family, and it may be that Jan would have suffered manic swings whatever had happened in her life – even if the war had never come and she had sat out a long, superficially happy marriage with Tony. It was, partly, a hereditary medical condition. But it is clear that circumstances had exacerbated it. She had got herself into a vicious circle, worrying about money, and about not writing her book: worrying so much that she could not eat without vomiting, which made it even more difficult to work on the book, which made her worry still more. She was heartbroken by the loss of the ‘family pattern’ and being separated from the children, who didn’t write many letters. Even a non-depressive woman might suffer sleep-depriving pangs of anxiety and remorse on finding herself in such a situation. But for someone prone to depression like Jan, such anxieties could be the catalyst of deep despair.

  She could not bring herself to write a letter, let alone a book.

  When I say physically impossible to write a letter [she wrote to her brother Douglas later, when he, too, was having a nervous breakdown], I mean just that: a literal, even if psychologically-induced, paralysis of the limbs which makes the effort of taking up a piece of paper and making marks on it with a pen so monumentally, inconceivably difficult that, sooner than do it, one rushes to the loo and vomits instead: the only relief that’s left to one, after one has got to the stage of not being able to cry. That was one of my worst horrors – excelled only by the sheer horror of having to answer the telephone. (‘What – me answer that screeching devilish contraption? Actually pick it up and say “Hello?” and perhaps hear some bad news, or a voice I don’t like, or a bank manager saying something nasty, or even a nice boring person who wants to come to dinner? Impossible. I won’t, I can’t, I shan’t, I’d sooner die, who the hell do they think I am, don’t they know that I am in hell and mustn’t be bothered? Let it ring – no, don’t let it ring – throw something at it, and stop it, and meanwhile just let me lie down on the floor, preferably under a table, and put a bearskin rug over my head and DIE…’) Does that ring a bell, or don’t you have that one?

  She could not face psychiatric help, and lived on a diet of sleeping-pills, sherry and cigarettes, unable to keep food down and sobbing herself to sleep in Dolf’s arms. Without telling her, he called in Dr Lawrence Kubie to see her. She was furious that he should have done so, and screamed; Dolf moved out of the apartment for a week. But Kubie took the matter in hand. He gave her pills to calm her nerves, and insisted that she start having appointments with him again. She agreed; and he realized, while listening to her sobs, that the ‘swings’ between the over-active drive and the retarded-depressive drive were now out of control.

  Just before Christmas Jan received a letter from Curtis Brown, the literary agents who had taken her on after the war (after years with A. P. Watt): ‘I’m afraid “Displaced Persons” [a poem she had written] has now been seen and declined by the New Yorker, the Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and Tomorrow. I’m afraid there are no further likely markets for this one and so, sadly, I’m returning the manuscript herewith.’ These were all, except for the New Yorker, magazines which had published Jan’s poems in earlier years. A few days later another letter followed: ‘I’m afraid “Green Warfare” has reached the end of the road.’ ‘Pome’ was declined by seventeen publications. She had apparently even lost the art of writing publishable poetry.

  But Curtis Brown were delighted with the first seven chapters of her autobiography, taking her life up to her early teens, which she had sent them in September. They suggested having illustrations drawn by E. H. Shepard. Glory was so near: all she needed to d
o was get herself to the age of twenty, and the autobiography would be finished.

  But the picking up of a pen remained out of the question. On 4 February 1949, on Dr Kubie’s recommendation, she was admitted as a voluntary patient at the Austin Riggs Center at Stockbridge, Massachusetts: a ‘psychiatric sanatorium’, a ‘nursing-home hotel’ – or, as Jan and her co-patients liked to call it, a ‘loony-bin’.

  * * *

  Here, a four-hour train journey from New York, in white-shuttered seclusion, she sobbed on the couch of Dr Kubie’s friend Dr Allen B. Wheelis, the Center’s resident psychoanalyst. Appointments with him took place every other day, and seemed to lead to nowhere. The clock ticked. Jan snuffled and blew her nose and wiped her glasses and put them on again, and then started crying again and took them off, and Dr Wheelis receded into a blur, and she blew her nose and put her glasses on again; and so it went on until the appointment was over and he said ‘We’ll stop there.’

  Between these appointments, life became a succession of gaps of time which had somehow to be got through.

  Describing her first day at Miss Richardson’s Classes in Great College Street, Westminster, aged six, when writing her autobiography a few months earlier, Jan had said that she had discovered she liked being a New Girl, and that this feeling had stayed with her all her life. She could not have known, as she wrote it, that she would soon be a New Girl all over again in an institution uncannily similar to a boarding school, but that this time she would be almost incapable of enjoyment.

  It was like a boarding school in that the corridors smelled of polish, the food was institutional (mushy spaghetti, and meatballs hard enough to play billiards with), friends tended to stick together in groups in the common rooms, there was a carpentry workshop in the grounds and a shop to buy snacks, and the tables were laid for breakfast immediately after the supper had been cleared. It was an expensive institution: Jan was there free of charge, ‘on a scholarship’, and slightly frowned on by the ‘full-tariff girls’.

  But it was actually a grotesque version of an Angela Brazil school paradise. The evening sight of the laid breakfast tables was a torment for the residents: it signified the changelessness of their mental states. The stage was set for another pointless day, just like the one which had nearly ended. All the residents were suffering from some kind of anxiety neurosis: some, like Jan, were so mentally and physically paralysed that they could hardly bring themselves to walk the fifty yards from the therapy centre back to the main building. Others were the opposite: all too keen to ‘act out’ their neuroses by running naked round the grounds, shouting. The first thing you did here, on waking up, was to take half a Seconal sleeping-pill, or ‘goof-ball’, and try to postpone consciousness. Then, when the Beethoven’s-Fifth-Symphony ‘ta-ta-ta-tum’ knock came to wake you up, you lit a cigarette in bed and smoked it, holding it between shaking fingers. Appetiteless, and with knees wobbling, you went to the dining-room and forced down cereal before going straight out to the corridor to smoke. Then, if your appointment on the couch was not till 11.30, there was a two-hour gap to fill.

  Jan’s two friends here were Hope Patterson and Harriet Harvey. There were male residents as well – Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, came here for rest and recuperation in the 1940s – but at this time in her life, Jan was seeking the company of women rather than men. She was quite changed from the ‘kittenish’ ‘child-wife’ who had so infuriated Anne Talbot on the Rumanian duck-shooting holiday in 1929 by her insistence on being the constant centre of male attention. Now she longed to talk to women, especially ones who were suffering like her, and to help them. The three sat on rocks talking about husbands, failed marriages, the dread of solitude, ‘the Willies’ and ‘the Tarantulas’ (their names for ‘the Jungles’), and the ‘Change of Life’ (as the menopause, often blamed for mid-life depression, was called). All too familiar with psychiatrist’s jargon, they parodied it, sprinkling their chat with ‘let me rephrase that’, ‘we’re skirting around the periphery’, ‘you are free to leave at any time you wish’, and ‘we’ll stop there’. If someone said she didn’t feel like playing chess, the rejoinder would be, ‘Resisting, huh? Come on, try to be a little co-operative.’

  A strict unwritten code developed among these women: if one of them was feeling desperate and asked you to ‘shoot a little pool’ to bridge the gap before lunch, you went and played pool with her, however black you might feeling, however little you cared whether any ball went into any pocket.

  ‘The Shop’ – the carpentry workshop – was open for four hours a day, closed on Sundays. While it was open, Jan was there. In the depths of her depression, though waking each morning with ‘the jitters’ and ‘the Willies’, she finished an inlaid chess table which was by far the most carefully-worked piece of furniture she had ever made. ‘At one moment,’ she wrote proudly to Jamie, in an effortfully cheerful letter, ‘it had no less than 23 clamps on it overnight.’

  Three months after she had arrived – and still with no improvement in sight – Dr Wheelis suggested that it might help to ‘unblock’ her if she attempted to get down on paper some of the thoughts which went through her head during the monotonous days. So on the morning of 17 May, returning to her room after her breakfast cigarette, she forced herself to sit down at her typewriter. ‘This is an experiment,’ she began.

  Yesterday was a particularly awful day. Mondays are always bad, especially after a good weekend – and the weekend had been better than usual, full of that sweet flowing interchange of thoughts and feelings between Dolf [who visited her at weekends] and me which is the mainspring of our rare relationship. In spite of all our worries and problems and joint nostalgia, it was a good weekend. By contrast, as well as intrinsically, yesterday was hell …

  She went on to describe a typical day at the sanitorium:

  After lunch comes a very long Gap. You long sometimes to take a nap: but you have learned from experience that you will wake up with an even worse attack of ‘tarantulas’, and will regret having exposed yourself to the horrors of two awakenings during the twenty-four hours instead of one. Sometimes you have letters to answer, and sometimes you go for a drive or a walk. None of these occupations is boring in itself – it’s just that all the time, but absolutely all of the time, the agony and worry are going on inside you, and the sense of futility, and the despair at getting nowhere. And outside the spring is going on, and you can’t feel it, and you think of that line out of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’, when he’s talking about sunsets and mountains and so on: ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’

  She described the feeling of being ‘blocked’ as a writer:

  It’s no good people saying, ‘Sit down for an hour or two a day and WRITE!’ You can’t spin writing out of your own belly like a spider spinning a web: it’s something that comes partly from outside, or rather, it’s a two-way process, born of your own relationship with the universe … I’m like a radio set that’s on the blink: I can’t tune in any more to any programme worth listening to – only to soap operas and third-rate commentators. And yet I know that all the time the ether is full of Brandenburg Concertos and superb performances of Antony and Cleopatra.

  She filled fifteen pages: and the act of writing about the tawdriness of the ‘hell’ did have the effect of helping her to see her way out of it. Two days later, during her appointment with Dr Wheelis, she read aloud to him what she had written. When she had finished, he said, ‘I find that very moving.’ It seemed a pity, he said, that it couldn’t be published somewhere, and he asked her to carry on writing. He went to the bookshelf and produced some pamphlets for her to read, about ‘Artistic Experience’ and ‘Aesthetic States of Mind’, and Jan was encouraged and touched. This was what happened to her mood:

  I left his office and walked back to the Shop in a state of definite and recognizable euphoria – that state which in my experience you only get into (no, not only, but most often) when you are either in love or have just written some
thing which you feel is good and genuine, especially if it has just ‘moved’ somebody else whose opinion you value, whether to tears or laughter. I found myself walking springily, and I thought of the rightness of all the old clichés, such as ‘walking on air’, ‘being in high spirits’, and ‘having a light heart’. I felt walking was far too prosaic a means of progression, and that it would have been more appropriate to my mood to go all the way from Wheelis’s office to the Shop turning cartwheels.

  When she reached the lawn in front of the main house, she saw ‘Polish John’, the gardener, in his bare feet, pushing the mowing machine, and she realized that for the first time since her depression she was able to smell the grass – always for her and for Dolf a symbol of joy. Not only could she smell it: she could also feel in her own shod feet the sensation Polish John must have been feeling in his bare ones. The ‘two-way’ relationship with the universe was beginning to return.

  On 6 June Dr Wheelis suggested that she try going home to New York for the weekend. She was nervous about this, partly because she was worried about what people there might think. ‘I can imagine myself running into Fatso Kubik, our Czech superintendent,’ she typed, ‘and him looking at me and seeing that I am apparently in perfect health, with a sun-tan, as fat as a pig, and then me having to explain that I’m only back for the weekend and shall be leaving again on Sunday night: and I can imagine him going down to his apartment in the basement and discussing it with his wife and saying, “Well, it don’t look to me like there’s anything wrong with her. Why don’t she come back and stay back? Sump’n screwy about the whole set-up.”’ But she went. Dolf collected her from Grand Central and she felt ‘like a farmer’s wife on her first visit to the Big City’, shocked by the traffic jams and hooting horns. He carried her over the threshold into the apartment. She went round touching everything, and embraced her Staffordshire zebra. After dinner at their local Italian restaurant (annoyingly called ‘Tony’s’), Dolf played the piano while Jan unpacked, and they went to bed early in the sweltering heat. She woke the next morning with ‘slight Jungles’ but made breakfast for Dolf. ‘It was the first time he had had breakfast made for him for over four months, and he was most touchingly thrilled about it.’