The Real Mrs Miniver (40 page)

The film opened in at Radio City in New York in October; but Jan was not there. She never saw it. Though she always dissociated herself from the character, she knew privately that a bit of her was, or had once been, Mrs Miniver, and nothing would induce her to witness her death at the hands of a Hollywood studio.

Jamie arrived in New York, and off he and Jan went on their agricultural tour of America.

Liebstes [she wrote to Dolf from Cabin 2, Bass Point Camp, Lake Rd 14b, Missouri on 17 October 1950], Remind me never to be away from you for so long ever any more. Silly, ain't it, to get so mixed up with another human being that one feels a 3 weeks' separation is a kind of amputation? (And besides, I am as randy as hell.) At the same time, I'm glad you weren't able to come with us, because you would have been bored to a frazzle and sick at the stomach with fast driving, and with the inspissated foulness of the food we've been forced to eat.
Really
what I think of American cooking …

Jamie is a very sweet companion, and we have lots of jokes all the time, and lots of hill-billy music on the car radio. We stop here & there by the wayside when we see interesting breeds of pigs, sorry, hawgs, or cattle, & go and ask the owner about them. The heat at the Kansas City show was terrific, & even Jamie got a mite tired of looking at bulls' behinds …

The whole country is too big, & all the middle part ought to be compressed & shrunk like one of those South American Indian human heads.

Was it middle America that had changed, or was it Jan? She was not sure. All she knew was that she was falling out of love with the country which had so enchanted her during her wartime travels. In those distant, gasoline-rationed years, each small town she visited had seemed fascinatingly different from the last: now, she was aware only of their ‘ghastly, ghastly sameness'. Was it just that there were no charming, dowdy sponsors waiting to greet her at each town or give her a ‘bokay' on railway platforms? Or was it that a new complacency was settling where unspoiltness had been? It was perhaps a bit of both. Showing Jamie America, she wrote afterwards, felt ‘like introducing him to somebody one has married but has in the meanwhile fallen out of love with and now sees the faults of.'

She waved goodbye to Jamie as he boarded his ship back to Britain and came home to an angry letter from Janet about a radio-phonograph Jan had sold without asking Janet's permission: and these two things tipped her over into the new depression she had felt coming. All the good that Stockbridge and Dr Wheelis had done a year before seemed to have been undone. She was back where she started. The symptoms were the same: confusion, perpetual tension and sobbing, an inability to keep food down, revulsion against cooking and letter-writing, a disinclination to answer the telephone, a feeling of inadequacy in company, and a dread of being alone.

Desperate to recapture the magic that had worked eighteen months before, she started typing a diary of her days to show to her new psychiatrist in New York, Dr Jackel, recommended by Dr Wheelis. His method during appointments was not to ask her a single question. ‘I begged him to ask me questions,' Jan wrote in her first instalment on 12 December 1950, ‘but he said the usual stuff about how if he asked questions it would put ideas into my head about what he considered important. I started trying to tell him about my childhood, and my parents not getting on, and how I felt a dread of the repeating pattern: but in the middle of it all I was overcome with discouragement and despair and folded up almost entirely.'

Now she had every reason to panic. If each ‘cure' from depression was only temporary, was it worth being cured at all?

Will it go on this way for the rest of my life? If so, I can't see the point of being alive, with this dread of recurrence hanging over me. The happiest thing would be to get killed in an accident at one of the moments when one is normal and on top of the world: but that kind of thing doesn't happen, and anyway, when I'm on top of the world I have such a keen zest for life that I don't want to die, ever. Was it real, that sense of joy, that welling-over of love and sympathy towards one's fellow-beings, that energy, that desire to help make the world better for people, that urge to create things? If it was real, how can it have so utterly gone? What is real, and what is unreal?

She carried on with her television and radio appearances throughout this time, and audiences had no idea that she was a nervous wreck when not in public view. With a supreme effort of will, she could act her former self for long enough to ensure that, as she put it, ‘the show could go on'. She appeared on the television programme
Celebrity Time
as a co-guest with the critic John Mason Brown, in which they had to play charades and tell ‘riveting little anecdotes' about their literary careers. Jan felt ‘jittery' all afternoon, and found the endless waiting beforehand, with camera rehearsals, almost intolerable. ‘But it went off all right – as far as anything so idiotic
could
be all right. There were fifty people in the studio, spending nine hours preparing for half an hour of almost complete crap.'

Each week in February and March 1951 she was on the panel of a television programme called
We Take Your Word,
in which the players had to make up the etymology of a given word. Two were false, one was correct: it was an etymological
Call My Bluff.
This was Jan's response to the word ‘pumpernickel': ‘A young lieutenant in Napoleon's army arrived on horseback at an inn in Prussia one evening, tired and hungry. After arranging for his horse, Nicolai, to be watered and stabled, the officer demanded his own dinner. The innkeeper's wife brought him an unfamiliar dark bread which he took a bite of and then threw on the floor with disgust. “C'est bon pour Nicolai!” he said.'

The audience laughed and clapped: but by the middle of the night, Jan was back in a state of despair. The act of typing long tracts about her days was not helping this time. The magic which had worked so well at Stockbridge, she realized, must have been like an amulet or a magic charm in a fairytale, which only worked once.

In the mornings, when Dolf went out to work, someone always came to sit with her. One day, when neither Bennes nor Pauly could come, Pauly arranged for one of her Viennese friends to come instead: and this visit induced in Jan a final wail of despair.

Well, she arrived – a nice, quiet little woman with a kind face. She asked whether there wasn't some mending or something that she could do for me, and I managed to find her a few stockings and slips that needed washing, which she is at present doing in the bathroom. No doubt she is wondering how the hell I can be in this state and yet still be able to go on doing the radio and television jobs. She must think I'm such a phoney – or maybe she understands more about such things than I imagine she does. Poor thing – she lives quite alone in a little apartment on 98th Street, and she has very little money and – at the moment – no job. She was in concentration camp in Europe and lost everything, like so many of them. And here am I, by comparison so damned lucky and well-off and successful – what must she think of me for being ‘depressed'? It's one of those cases which one
feels
ought to make one ashamed of grumbling about anything – but it just doesn't
work
that way. If one's in this kind of state, one loses the ability to make comparisons. Hell is absolute, not comparative. How am I to get out of it? How, how, how?

There was a way out. In August 1951 Jan was diagnosed as having breast cancer, and a mastectomy was carried out at once. Her revulsion against living was replaced by a deep and justified fear of dying.

Chapter Seventeen

Honour the true believer,

    
The man whose feet have trod

Life's road of fret and fever

    
Sustained by trust in God.

Whatever foes assailed him

    
He faced them fair and square:

His strong sword never failed him –

    
Faith in the power of prayer.

Crown him with wreaths of laurel,

    
Of myrtle and of bay:

With that I have no quarrel –

    
Yet spare one slender spray

For him who, unbelieving,

    
Unpious, undevout,

Long wandering and weaving

    
Among the pits of doubt,

Faced, prayerless and unweeping,

    
The flying spears of grief,

Unarmed, yet proudly keeping

    
Faith with his unbelief.

‘Prayer', written in hospital, August 1951

 

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
to blame again, and something official to be brave about. Though Jan was terrified of cancer, with its implications of impending death, the shock gave her the violent jolt she needed to regain a sense of the preciousness of life. In bed, she wrote a poem to her surgeon: ‘… And though in the glass I look like heck to me, I'm grateful for this neat mastectomy.' She also wrote the poem quoted overleaf, which she paraphrased in a letter to Jamie: ‘If one never bothers with the Old Man in one's good moments, it doesn't seem quite cricket to pester him during one's bad ones.' Her ink, once again, was beginning to flow.

Physically, the mastectomy caused in her a
coup de vieux.
She was fifty: but she now felt and looked old. Privately she was horrified with the ‘butchery' which had been done to her body. ‘She never wanted me to see her naked again,' Dolf remembered. The mastectomy was pronounced successful by the doctors: she was supposedly cleared of cancer, but her face was puffy with the medicine and alcohol of the past years, her hair was thin and grey, her sight was bad, and her back ached. ‘I'd better get this letter off quickly,' she wrote to Jamie, ‘in case any other bits of me drop off or fail to work.'

But, writing to her brother in September 1951, in response to his depressive cry for help (‘Personally the only thing I feel at the moment is that I want to die and never come out of anything again. Any advice on how to break the spell of Nervous B.?'), Jan realized that she, concerned now with physical recovery, was the lucky one. ‘
My
problem is the comparatively simple one of training one group of muscles to do, in addition to their own work, all the work of the front group which used to run from the breast-bone to the armpit (a fan-shaped job called the pectorals). This is just a matter of strains and stresses, and quite an interesting engineering problem to work out. (See a medical dicker or a book on anatomy.) If only
yours
were as easy, my poor darling, either to cope with personally or to give advice about.'

With the clarity of someone who has known but emerged from depression, she described her own ‘hell' vividly to Douglas, and then suggested that a way of dealing with it was to accept the ‘conflicting roles' which one was trying to play. These were hers:

1 Jan Struther, the well-known and successful writer, lecturer, radio-performer etc. (with a subdivision called Jan Struther, the much-too-little-known and really pretty terrific serious poet whose depth and brilliance will only really be appreciated by a discerning literary public after she is dead!)

2 ex-Joyce Maxtone Graham, a fugitive from a country-house chain-gang, who, while she is damned glad not to be saddled with the boredom of Showing Visitors the Garden, does occasionally hanker after the comparative physical easiness of the Old Days.

3 Joyce, the mother of Jamie, Janet and Robert, who misses the children and wishes she lived closer to them so that she could at least see them every few weeks, or months, and be in close touch with their everyday lives, love affairs, etc.

4 Jan Placzek, the happily-married wife of a most exceptionally kind, understanding, considerate, witty, charming and creative man with whom she has been in love – and he with her – since the very day they met, twelve-years-ago-come-November 21st.

5 Jan, the expatriate European, who likes many things about America, notably the comparative social informality, the extremes of climate, and the enormous variety of its geographical features; but who dislikes a great many other things about it such as the hysterical silliness of its politics, the monotony of its architecture, and – with a large handful of wonderful exceptions – the bloody futility of its inhabitants' conversations: and who, every now and then, gets an almost physical ache to hear a cowbell in the Alps, or a peal of bells from an English church tower (so long as she wouldn't have to go to the service!), or to see a really old, muddly, quiet village clustered round a manor house, with
NO STRAIGHT LINES ANYWHERE
.

6 and this is a very important role in the repertory, and one which most grown-ups don't understand or even know about – Joyce Anstruther, aged somewhere between eight and twelve, the little frog-faced girl whose favourite occupation was playing desert islands in the rubbish-tip with the gardener's sons,
BUT
who didn't realize at the time (or, as a matter of fact, till quite recently) that what made that era of one's life so idyllic was that there was always one's Nannie in the background who could pick one up if one fell out of a tree and would unfailingly tuck one up at night and ‘pat one to sleep'; the woman of 50 who, even now, when she should be writing an article or story, is apt to spend the whole morning watching an interesting caterpillar in the garden, or constructing a piece of furniture out of packing-cases: who, in fact, ought to be smacked.

For years, she had been trying various approaches: she had tried confining herself to one of these roles – which led to frustrations and discontent – and she had tried combining them all – which led to physical and nervous exhaustion. What she was learning to do now, with Dolf's help, was to recognize that they all existed, that they were all part of her, and that she need not feel ashamed or guilty about any of them, since they were all quite natural. There was no hint in this letter to Douglas that her brush with cancer had helped her finally to snap out of depression: this was Dolf's personal observation.