War and Space in English Fiction, 1940-1950

A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX WARWICK SMITH – DPHIL (ENGLISH) WAR AND SPACE IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1940-1950 Submitted January 2016 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX WARWICK SMITH – DPHIL (ENGLISH) WAR AND SPACE IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1940-1950 This thesis argues that a preoccupation with space is a characteristic feature of English fiction in the years following the out break of the Second World War and, more specifically, that the war’ s events caused this heightened interest in the spatial. Writing from the 1940s exhibits an anxious perplexity in its spatial descriptions which reveals an underlying philosophical uncertainty; cultural assumptions about spatial categories were destabilised by the war and this transformation left its mark on literature. Writers in London during the war were among civilians shocked by new sensory assaults and dramatic changes to the urban landscape. These material facts exerted pressures on the collective imagination and a major part of the literary response was an urgently-renewed interest in the problematics of space. The primary literary focus here is on Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, though work by other writers including Graham Greene, Mervyn Peake and William Sansom is also discussed. I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to illustrate the challenge phenomenological thinking posed to prevailing cultural conceptions of space in this period and to suggest how the war directed writers’ attention to the role that embodied perception plays in composing spaces. I also examine how technological change, particularly development of the V2 rocket, shook established spatial thinking and I discuss how conceptual categories such as adjacence, linearity and sequence were further disrupted by the political divisions of post-war Europe. Documentary and diary sources are used to support literary evidence. English fiction changed abruptly and significantly in the 1940s because of a fresh spatial understanding emerging from the war which shaped the culture of the Cold War and the space race. This change demands reassessment of a decade often dismissed in literary history as a dull interlude between temporally- dominated high modernism and a postmodern ‘turn to the spatial .’ CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………… .. 1 Chapter One This Memory of the Air …………... 27 Chapter Two The Rocket’s Leap ……………………. 82 Chapter Three Interwoven with Incredulity …. 129 Chapter Four Across the Zones …………………… .. 180 Conclusion The Hesitant Waltz …………………… .. 221 Bibliography ………………………………………………… . 237 1 INTRODUCTION English fiction written during and immediately after the Second World War reveals a fascination with both the psychic and physical involvement in the spatial; how humans perceive the spatial world and the part our bodies play in its construction. This interest in the spatial shows itself in the way that writers linger attentively over the arrangements of objects and landscapes and in the frequency and intensity with which they seek to describe the nature of experience of these spaces. These preoccupations, taken togther, suggest that literature of the 1940s exhibits an inquisitiveness about the nature of space which is implicitly, though rarely overtly, philosophic. Literary descriptons of the spatial in this period conceal an interrogation of its epistemological and ontological assumptions and this tendency reveals a general and more abstract anxiety about space in the years following the outbreak of the Second World War. The war changed the way people thought about space and, in literature, this generated an urgently renewed interest in ways of describing spatial manifestations and experience. Of course, all literature examines the nature of the spatial to some degree because it narrates events as taking place in space and time. The claim made here is that fiction arising from the war years in England treats space with a characteristic intensity and sense of perplexity. Occasionally critics have noted this tendency, if only in passing. For example D.J. Taylor, in After the War (1994), notes both the emphasis and the uncertainty attached to the spatial: ‘Many war novels give the impression that they take place in a void where all is dislocation and uncertainty. Time and the immediate past telescope into unquantifiable space .’ 1 In his introduction to the 2000 Vintage Classics edition of Henry Green’s Loving, Sebastian Faulks notes that the setting is one where ‘ownershi p of space is important and disputed .’ 2 Sara Wasson, in Urban Gothic of the Second World War (2010), suggests that urban wartime fiction meets two key definitions of a gothic aesthetic, one of which is ‘a preoccupation with certain 2 relationships to space’ 3 while Leo Mellor detects in B litz writing an ‘attentiveness toward the materiality of spaces that could be, and were, transformed w ith sudden and utter violence.’ 4 Where critics have sometimes registered the peculiarities of the literary treatment of space in this era, it is usually in the margins of their pursuit of other questions. To notice something is not the same as explaining it: there has been no sustained and general attempt to ask why so much literature of the 1940s seems so fascinated with space and what period-specific conditions might have engendered this fascination. There are several reasons why these questions may have been overlooked and to begin I will briefly examine three of them. The first is the problem of literary periodisation. So much of our understanding of twentieth- century literature, and art more broadly, is shaped by discussion of modernism and postmodernism that it can be hard to propose other significant moments in cultural history, especially if those moments fall between these categories. Both terms are fiercely debated and interrogated but arguments about if, and when, modernism gave way to postmodernism tend to subsume literary developments within one or other of those monolithic epochs. Even the term ‘late -modernism’ - sometimes used to embrace 1940s writing - reinforces the primacy of the parent movement even as it nuances it. An allied problem in understanding the literature of the war years is that those years, roughly mid-century, are often seen as as a natural divide between the period of high modernist experiment and what came after, but not as significant or interesting in themselves.Thus it has not always been easy to maintain a focus on literary developments in the 1940s, and the decade’s significance is often undervalued. As Patrick Deer, quoting Malcolm Bradbury, puts it : ‘Despite ample evidence to the contrary, literary critics continue to regard the 1940s as a perio d of “relative artistic silence” , a buffer zone between literary modernism and the angry neo- realism of the 1950s.’ 5 These issues of periodisation become even more vexed when we consider the understanding of space. Modernism is understood as broad cultural and intellectual change as well as artistic 3 revolution. Theorists have incorporated developing concepts of space and time in their account of modernism as a movement. The very title of Stephen Kern’s brilliant and influential The Culture of Time and Space , 1880-1918 (1983), firmly fixes the years in which ‘a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space’ 6 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, terminating at the end of the First World War. In terms of the spatial, Kern’s central conclusion is that this was the period when conceptions of space as inert and empty were replaced by an understanding of what he calls ‘positive -negative space’ – one which is ‘active and full .’7 Artistically, he argues, this new understanding of space is exemplified in the fiction of Proust, in the cubist painting of Braque and Picasso and the sculpture of Archipenko, all art produced during the First World War or in the few years either side. In contrast with Kern, the theorist of postmodernism Fredric Jameson diagnoses a fundamental shift in spatial understanding taking place in the late 1960s and 1970s as an effect of late capitalism. For Jameson, the emergence of a spatial dominant is the primary quality of postmodernism and the very thing which divides it from a modernist aesthetic. Modernists, he argues, were entirely subservient to the idea of time ‘whose empy coordinates they tried to conjure into the magical substance of an element, a veritable experiential stream. ’8 The postmodern age, by contrast, entails ‘a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic’ 9. Either way, both literature and spatial theory are firmly periodised. To follow Kern or Jameson is to choose either the modernist or postmodernist account of changes in the conception of space and to be steered away from the mid-twentieth century and the Second World War as a period of potential significance in the literary treatment

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