Love among the ruins

The phrase that gives this book its title is Graham Greene’s:

The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.

Greene was apparently proud of ‘love-charm’: he used it more than once. It seems to me that the most telling part of the full quotation, though, is that ‘unmistakable engine’. Isn’t Greene’s determination to hear those words in the machine noise a token of the way writers appropriate bare reality? The love-charm is crafted by the one it ensorcels.

Lara Feigel’s book is a well-researched, novelistically narrated story of the romantic entanglements of a handful of writers who sort of knew each other, or nearly did, during and after the second world war: Henry Yorke (aka Henry Green), Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Elizabeth Bowen.

The opening section makes the narrative case for their association with some verve, introducing them by plaiting the stories of what happened to each in the course of a single night in London: 26 September 1940.

For each, the war meant something slightly different. For Henry Yorke, it was excitement: working as an auxiliary fireman was sexually energising and socially freeing. Graham Greene skulked about, typically, hoping to be hit by a bomb. Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen felt the tensions over Irish neutrality as her own; while we hardly need rehearse the identity issues Hilde Spiel — an Austrian with a German husband — faced. (That said, the yearning to move out of Wimbledon is at least as powerful in her as the need to come to terms with her native identity.) Rose Macaulay — in her late fifties and with her longtime secret lover dying — careered around the bombed streets driving an ambulance recklessly fast: a lanky, mournful Penelope Pitstop.

The obvious point, well-made, is that the presence of death (and in many cases the absence of wives and children who had been evacuated to the country) made people frisky.