In her new book “The Love-charm of Bombs,†Lara Feigel writes about the impact of World War II on the lives, love affairs and work of five writers in London: Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Yorke (who wrote under the name Henry Green), Rose Macaulay and the Austrian émigré Hilde Spiel. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Feigel discussed the themes that hold these writers together, the pleasures Greene found in war, other group biographies she admires and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
What unites the central characters in your book?
All five experienced the war as an extraordinary, intense and often exhilarating time. Awful things were happening all around them and it could be horribly sad, especially for Rose Macaulay, whose secret lover of 20 years was dying, and for Hilde Spiel, who was sheltering from bombs dropped by her former countrymen. But within all the sadness and the destruction these writers developed a great capacity for life - living each moment as though it was their last, in what Elizabeth Bowen very beautifully described as “the tideless present.†It's not surprising that all the writers wrote their best novels during or in response to the war; all looked back on the war or the immediate postwar period as the most intense time of their lives.
When did you realize these lives could be threaded together in this way?
I was originally planning to write an academic study of war literature. But I kept finding that I was reading about the writers' lives, rather than reading about their books, and especially about their passionate wartime love affairs. Once I had spent time in their archives and read their wartime letters and diaries, I started to think that it's impossible fully to understand classic novels like Graham Greene's “The End of the Affair†or Bowen's “The Heat of the Day†without knowing about their lives, and seeing these books as urgent messages, written to lovers, and written out of an extraordinary time. A lot of parallels and shared experiences were emerging in the research, so it seemed obvious to tell the stories simultaneously, threading them together as in a novel.
Of the authors you write about, whose life was most dramatically changed by the war, either emotionally or in material terms?
Their lives were all changed enormously by the war, but I think the two people to be most lastingly affected were Macaulay and Bowen. Macaulay lost everything - her lover, her home, all her possessions - and spent the rest of her life reconciling herself to her loss. Bowen's transformation was much happier. She fell in love, irrevocably, with Charles Ritchie - and I think the vulnerability involved in this was somehow enabled by war - and also gained a new kind of confidence as a writer and a woman that shows in her postwar fiction.
You write that Greene felt an “anarchic exhilaration†from the war's destruction. Why did he welcome the war in a way others didn't?
Greene was a manic-depressive. In his childhood he'd played Russian roulette with a loaded gun. He thrived on danger, because the moment of surviving an encounter with death was a moment of being intensely aware that he was alive. He spent his 20s longing for war, going off to seek danger elsewhere, and he found in the Blitz a respite from his usual feeling of dissatisfaction. He was dismissive of pacifists, because he thought that if war were really as unpleasant as they made it sound it would have gone out of fashion long ago. And he was delighted when his house was bombed, because it made him feel oddly weightless. This makes him seem very unpleasant, which he wasn't. He was just easily depressed and dissatisfied, and he found it easier to enjoy the everyday pleasures of writing, love and friendship against a background of danger.
Johnathan Ring Lara FeigelThe book addresses literary, military and political history. Did any of them in particular present a challenge, given your previous experience?
I'm a literary critic and historian by training and inclination, but I enjoyed the challenge of acquiring new kinds of knowledge in researching this book. I read a few military accounts of the war, but I learned a lot of the war news from reading contemporary diaries and newspapers. I wanted only to convey as much as well-informed people knew at the time. After all, my writers weren't military experts, just people who found themselves living through a complicated and long-drawn-out war.
American readers will be least familiar with Hilde Spiel. Can you briefly describe her work, and where someone interested in it might start?
Spiel was a realist novelist with a great sense of atmosphere and place and also a courageous openness to the fact that people don't often feel what they ought to feel. I think her most compelling work now is her autobiography, “The Dark and the Bright,†which has been beautifully translated into English by her daughter, Christine Shuttleworth. It's wonderfully evocative of the atmosphere of 1920s and postwar Vienna and of wartime London. American readers might also enjoy her novel “The Darkened Room,†which she wrote in English and first published in 1961. It portrays the experience of an exile in America.
Your book's bibliography lists many titles about these writers and this period. Is there one in particular you think is undervalued that readers should seek out?
I would recommend Adam Piette's “Imagination at War,†which is a wonderful account of the oddness of the literary responses to the Second World War. Sarah LeFanu's biography of Macaulay is also a brilliant book, especially good on Macaulay's wartime experiences.
John Sutherland commended your book as an entry in the genre of “new biography� What is new biography?
I think we'd have to ask John Sutherland what he meant, but “New Biography†was first used in an essay by Virginia Woolf, who was talking about the intimate (and at the time shockingly scurrilous) new mode of writing biography developed by her friend Lytton Strachey. I'd be very flattered for my biography to be compared with Strachey's [work]. I think, though, that Sutherland was talking about the new biography as a genre that tells history through group biography; that is certainly what I was trying to do.
Whether “new biography†or not, were there other books you admired or used as models that bring together a group of people?
The best group biographies tend to be accounts of people who were conscious of being a group at the time, unlike my group. Jenny Uglow's “The Lunar Men,†Daisy Hay's “Young Romantics†and Michael Holroyd's “A Strange Eventful History†are all brilliant examples of this kind of book. Although it's not quite a group biography, I found Edmund de Waal's “The Hare With the Amber Eyes†very inspiring as an example of a book that intermingles history and biography and uses the passions and sorrows of individual lives as a way to give an oblique account of a time and a place.
