Writing (In) the Spaces of the Blitz: Spatial Myths and Memory in Wartime British Literature
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Writing (in) the Spaces of the Blitz: Spatial Myths and Memory in Wartime British Literature by Katherine E. Fisher A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Andrea P. Zemgulys Associate Professor Kristin A. Hass Professor Anita Norich Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson Copyright © Katherine E. Fisher 2014 Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the help of many teachers, mentors, and friends, beginning with the professors who taught me as an undergraduate. I am particularly indebted to George Tate, who first taught me to see the beautiful and terrible in war literature, and Matthew Wickman, who challenged me intellectually and encouraged me to pursue this path. At the University of Michigan, I have been fortunate to work with thoughtful and generous advisors who have helped me to become a better reader, thinker, and writer. Thank you to Andrea Zemgulys for patient and consistent feedback that helped me give form to my ideas, to John Whittier-Ferguson for enthusiasm about modernism and war literature and for transformative counsel on writing, and to Anita Norich and Kristin Hass for insights essential to thinking through issues of memorialization and the stakes of writing about war. This project also benefitted directly from the instruction and feedback I received in courses taught by Julia Hell, Gregg Crane, Daniel Herwitz, and Paul Conway. Logistical and financial assistance from the Department of English and Rackham Graduate School supported me in the writing of this project and enabled me to travel to the UK for archival research. I am grateful to members of staff at the London Metropolitan Archives, University of Sussex Special Collections, the Imperial War Museum London, the National Archives at Kew, and the British Library for responding to my inquiries and aiding me in my research. Thanks also to the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive and to the Imperial War Museums for allowing my use of quotations and images from their collections. ii Graduate school found me in the company of the best cohort I could imagine. My scholarship and pedagogy have been shaped largely by their influence, and I have benefitted immeasurably from the friendship of this brilliant and collegial group throughout my time at Michigan. Thank you especially to Jessica Morton for being my original fellow modernist, helping me to discover some of the texts that made their way into my dissertation, and serving as a sounding board for many of my ideas. Thanks also to Leila Watkins for unfailing hospitality and excellent advice and Bessie McAdams and Micki Fasteland for moral support and practical help in my teaching and research. I am grateful to the many other friends and relatives who have listened to me talk incessantly about World War II and who have read drafts of this dissertation. Finally, my thanks to Peter Shirts for constant support and encouragement and for believing in me and my work. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Figures v Abstract vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO Imagining the Home Front 18 CHAPTER THREE Bombed Houses: War in the Private Sphere 67 CHAPTER FOUR Unreal City: Navigating London in the Blitz 118 CHAPTER FIVE Wartime Pastoral: Englishness and the Land 165 CODA 241 Bibliography 245 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Druid Street Arch Bombing marker. 4 Figure 2: Memorial for the Bethnal Green disaster. 4 Figure 3: Christchurch Greyfriars. 6 Figure 4: St. Dunstan in the East. 6 Figure 5: Memorial to the civilians of East London injured or killed during the Second World War, Hermitage Riverside Memorial Garden. 7 Figure 6: Details from the Battle of Britain monument. 9 Figure 7: “Blitz kitsch” for sale in the gift shop of the Cabinet War Rooms. 10 Figure 8: Sydney Curnow Vosper, Queer Vegetation! 34 Figure 9: Charles J. Bathurst, An Interior—Canning Town. 54 Figure 10: Henry Moore, Women and Children in the Tube. 57 Figure 11: Mary Tunbridge, Dig for Victory. 189 Figure 12: Eileen Evans, Lend a Hand on the Land. 189 Figure 13: Lowen, Dreams—War Savings Will Bring Them to Life. 191 Figure 14: Worth Fighting For; Worth Saving For. 191 Figure 15: Frank Newbould, “The South Downs,” Your Britain: Fight for It Now. 193 Figure 16: Abram Games, “A School in Cambridgeshire,” Your Britain: Fight for It Now. 193 v Abstract This dissertation examines the literary response to the Second World War and the Blitz in Britain. I argue that the physical spaces and landscapes of wartime Britain offered writers a metaphorical vocabulary for addressing war’s devastating consequences and imagining a possible future. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, experimental, popular, and amateur writers alike responded to the extreme circumstances of aerial attack in innovative ways that reveal an unexpected convergence in the preoccupations of modernist highbrow and routine middlebrow writing in a time of war. A comprehensive study of Blitz writing substantially alters narratives of midcentury modernism, war writing, and British literary history. Blitz writers, generating a new type of battlefield text by and about non-soldiers, remade the physical spaces of England and transformed their symbolic value. In their work, air raid shelters, bombsites, and ruins become new catalysts for social and ideological encounters, which are also played out in more traditional literary spaces. Houses and domestic space are thrust from the private into the public sphere and lose their reassuring associations under threat of destruction. Bombed London and its urban spaces seem threatening and unreal, demanding imaginative rebuilding. The countryside invites a return to pastoral imagery as a way to address the war’s challenge to English history and identity. Texts that demonstrate the complex memory work associated with these spaces include Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time, Henry Green’s Caught, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, vi James Hanley’s No Directions, Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, Mollie Panter- Downes’s One Fine Day, and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, along with lesser-known poetry, fiction, diaries, journalism, and propaganda. This project uses such texts to reconstruct a literary geography of the home-front experience in World War II Britain and create a memorial landscape that recalls how the air raids and bombings were understood and remembered during and immediately after the war. vii CHAPTER ONE Introduction In every nation men and women have shown themselves undeterred by the horrors of aerial war. But here in this tight little island, we weren’t sure that it would apply to us. After all, Spain, Poland, Belgium, France were inured to warfare, battle had recurred so often on their territory, that they were trained to face it. But here where life had always been so secure and peaceful, where the last battle was fought in 1745, could we take it.1 The Second World War occurred in a cultural and memorial climate shaped largely by the First World War. The horrors of the earlier war are recorded on the very land of the Western Front, where “remembrance is part of the landscape.”2 Memorials and cemeteries dot the region, and the trenches and mine craters preserved as sites of memory offer vivid reminders of the battles that took place there. The war left the topographical legacy of a countryside shaped by the violence of the conflict and continuing to yield its detritus…. Even today, crop markings indicate the presence of bunkers and underground munitions deposits, and at certain times of the year the fields of Picardy show zigzagging bands of whiter soil: the result of the underlying chalk beds having been disturbed by the trench lines and artillery bombardments. Every year, on average, nearly two thousand tons of munitions, equipment, and other detritus continue to be unearthed by plowing, or otherwise find their way to the surface of the former battlefields, in what is called the ‘iron harvest.’… Hence, the physical landscape of the Western Front still records the violence visited upon it.3 The physical spaces of the First World War remain vital to the formulation of its history and memory, and the sites that still exist today offer an evocative anchor for the story of the war. 1 Warner, “Journal under the Terror,” 22 September 1940. 2 Winter, Sites of Memory, 1. 3 Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism, 189. 1 This project began in part as an attempt to define an analogous landscape that “materially testifies”4 to the Second World War as experienced in Britain. Where, I wondered, does one go to remember and reconstruct the Blitz,5 a battle without a battlefield in the usual sense? Our understanding of the Second World War and the Blitz is shaped by the spaces they created and redefined, but these spaces lack a physical geography equivalent to the trenches and battlefields of the Western Front to testify to their ongoing existence and importance. I aim, therefore, to reconstruct a literary geography of the home-front experience and make legible the ways the Blitz is written into the landscape and inscribed upon cities in subtle and symbolic ways. This is the landscape that inspired a new type of battlefield text by and about non-soldiers, and as such it reflects transformed ways of looking at the physical spaces of war. In this dissertation, I set forth a three-part argument: First, the textual spaces present in Blitz writing, especially in Blitz fiction, provided a conceptual vocabulary for writers to express the effects of the war, just as the physical landscapes of the First World War furnished the metaphorical vocabulary necessary for modernist writing to address war’s devastating consequences.6 Second, Blitz writing demonstrates the changes undergone by powerful spatial symbols put under pressure by the circumstances of war.