The Real Mrs Miniver (39 page)

‘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 something 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.'

In this quiet, homely, unadventurous way her recovery continued, and she left Stockbridge for good in July, five months after her arrival.

*   *   *

August was spent away from the heat of New York, on Island 727 of the 30,000 in Georgian Bay, Ontario, staying with Bev and Marian Robinson. A photograph survives of this vacation: a picnic scene, in which a smiling Jan is holding her pocket-knife threateningly towards Dolf's face. She could still be an unnerving person to be at a picnic with. She peppered her talk with four-letter words (which invariably came as a shock to anyone who expected her to be like Mrs Miniver); but apart from her swearing and her occasional knife-wielding, she was good company.

A manic gesture with the pocket-knife

In New York she was on the radio and television again, appearing on quiz programmes and doing ‘Guest Spot' jobs, and she signed a contract with Columbia Broadcasting. ‘You can be forgotten in America,' she wrote to her brother, ‘because they have been so goddamned loving that they've run you ragged with popularity, and you think you're down & out & flat-broke & will never stage a comeback – and then you do one little 15-minute radio show, as I did last week, & within 24 hours they're all on your neck again.'

But she and Dolf were none the less almost ‘flat-broke', and could not legally break the lease on an apartment which they could no longer afford.

Our rent at this apartment sorry flat is so screwing sorry fucking high [she wrote to Douglas], namely $1680 a year for two repeat
TWO
rooms, that we are perpetually one jump ahead of the sheriff, which doesn't worry me because I was born with a silver bailiff in my mouth, but
does
worry Dolf, who comes of a respectable Viennese family. He had two ‘firsts' yesterday: (1) he found his own name in
Debrett
– a thing that his grandfather, the Grand Rabbi of Moravia, would hardly have foreseen happening; and (2) he had his first bounced cheque returned, from the Columbia Men's Faculty Club. So I had to take a
taxi
down to the Guaranty Trust (it's so expensive being broke, don't you find?) and cash a cheque, and Dolf braved the Faculty Club cashier. He was terribly upset and embarrassed about it last night. ‘Do relax, darling, and let me go to sleep,' I said to him. ‘Everybody in
Debrett
has bouncing cheques … Two terms abshlutely sh'nonymous…'

But then something happened which was a little bit eerie, but which brought a sudden prospect of financial rescue. MGM were in the process of making a sequel to
Mrs Miniver,
to be called
The Miniver Story:
and they had taken a liberty with Jan's fictional character. She wrote to Jamie explaining the state of affairs:

We are in the midst of two delicious bits of legal proceedings, one against our landlord, who is the son of a bitch, and one against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who is so to speak the bitch that our landlord is the son of. Briefly, it seems that MGM have nearly finished making the sequel to
Mrs M.,
and that Mrs M. dies of cancer in the last act. I have (genuinely) received no less than three offers recently to do a sequel myself, and the gist of my case is, ‘Oy, you carn' do that there 'ere.' We are very much hoping, and it looks pretty promising, judging by the obviously damp state of the MGM attorney's pants, that they will what's delicately called Prefer To Settle It Out Of Court. If not, then they'll bloody well have to settle it
in
court. Bastards. Even if I didn't want to accept the offers, they've still got no right to make it impossible for me to do so by killing the old girl off.

MGM did settle it out of court. On 15 February 1950, after coming home from seeing
The Third Man
at the cinema (‘Dolf and Pauly cried in their beards and were
ganz
nostalgic, and it was simply thrilling, and if you haven't seen it you must,' Jan wrote to Jamie), Jan received a cheque from MGM for $13,000 – $5,000 for the sequel, and $8,000 in damages for killing off Mrs Miniver. They celebrated with Kümmel. ‘Let's not waste all this lovely money,' Jan said. ‘Let's spend it.'

She did not find it difficult. The swing from penury to riches echoed her swings from depression to euphoria. In June she and Dolf sailed to England, where they missed Robert. He was nineteen, doing his two-year National Service in the Scots Guards, and had been commissioned and sent to Malaya with his regiment a few weeks before she arrived. This, for Jan, was ‘sickeningly disappointing' as well as worrying. Robert was not communicating with her by letter, and she longed to see him. She and Dolf spent time with Jamie in Scotland, and went to Paris to meet Janet, who was staying there; Jan and Janet got on badly, and Jan returned to New York feeling that two of her three children were out of sympathy with her.

But she also returned with a comforting prospect in view: Jamie was to sail to America in September, and he and she planned to go on a road trip for three weeks. She wanted to show him the country she had grown to know and love during the war years, and he wanted to look at American livestock and farming methods. But she found that, rather than looking forward to his visit, she was merely dreading his leaving, even before he had arrived.

Still reckless with the proceeds of the MGM damages, Jan and Dolf moved into a ground-floor apartment at 68 West 68th Street which had its own garden (‘Moving house is my favourite indoor sport,' Jan wrote to Jamie). While they were settling in and putting plants into pots,
The Miniver Story
opened in London at the Empire, Leicester Square. (It had been filmed in Britain, in a quest for the ‘realism' which had been missing the first time.) ‘Remember the Minivers!' proclaimed the MGM advertisements. The public, it turned out, preferred to remember the Minivers as they were in the original picture, rather than be re-introduced to them looking tired and ill in post-war Britain. The film lost Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $2,311,000. The only good thing the
Punch
critic could say about it was that Mrs Miniver's death in the last act at least ensured there would be no further sequels, ‘for which on the whole we may be grateful'.

It is a dreadful film. Its direction by H. C. ‘Hank' Potter merely emphasizes how good William Wyler's was. In the original film, no scene went on for too long; in the sequel, every scene does, and a pall of gloom hangs over the whole. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon still play the leading roles, Garson looking middle-aged and careworn and Pidgeon lacking the wit and wryness which made the first film uplifting in spite of its tragic events. The children are all utterly changed. Vin is absent altogether, his death in the Battle of Britain fleetingly mentioned: Garson had refused to act with her former husband Richard Ney. Judy, now played by Cathy O'Donnell, is a cold, depressed post-war maiden, and Toby, played by James Fox, has grown into a charmlessly precocious and loud-voiced twelve-year-old. The audience knows Mrs Miniver is dying of cancer – the film opens with her visit to the doctor for the diagnosis (‘not less than six months, not more than a year') – but Clem doesn't, and the first hour is spent in the dreary tension of waiting for her to collapse and then break the news to him. In one of the dullest scenes of the film, she and Clem dance together, slowly and sadly, in his office overlooking a bomb-site, to the music of a barrel-organ playing outside. After seeing to it that Judy marries a good honest local boy rather than the cad she is in love with, Mrs Miniver dies. Clem is left with the last words, reflecting on her goodness and wisdom.