The Real Mrs Miniver (41 page)

The family from which she had separated herself by coming to live in America was working itself into new patterns. Janet, at Christmas 1950, had become engaged to Patrick Rance, a delightful ex-Regular-Army Major and High Anglican vicar's son, a lover of butterflies, books, Bach and France. They were married in Perthshire, and Tony gave a grand reception for them at Cultoquhey. Jan did not go: as she wrote to Jamie, ‘I'd hate her to have a repetition of the Atmosphere that obtained when Tony and I were married.' She did not meet Patrick until after the wedding, but glowing reports of him came from everyone who met him; and all the crossness seemed to have gone out of Janet, who was turning into a mature, settled, loving daughter and mother-to-be. Jamie became engaged to a charming Scottish girl, Diana Macgregor. And Tony now had a woman friend who was helping him (as Jan had hoped someone would) ‘to blossom into his natural gaiety'. Her name was Peggy Barne, and she was a mother of five from Suffolk, who had first met Tony at Pirbright Camp during the war when her husband, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Barne, was stationed there. ‘Tony's Peggy', Rachel Townsend wrote to Jan, ‘is beautiful, and calming (and full of jokes) – highly sympathetic.' She also loved golf.

The children, now grown-ups, were finding their paths through life; and Jan began to get on with hers, trying to cast the anguish of the past years aside. Though she no longer had her children nearby, or Europe, or the social status of ‘the Laird's Lady', or the ability to finish a book, or the magic touch with Hollywood, she had Dolf, and for the moment she was ready to embrace the tranquillity that this brought. There was a sense of ‘All passion spent'. Dolf had stood by her during her depression, when she had been almost intolerable to live with: now she wanted to be for him the wife that he needed. There was a change of key: whereas before she had been driven through life by burning causes, both public and private, now her ambitions and pleasures were more muted. This slowing-down of the tempo was balm after depression and physical illness.

In the garden at 68 West 68th Street with Anne Talbot and Cleveland Ward, 1951

She sat on a mahogany chair drinking tea out of a Wedgwood cup and discussing poetry with Mr Adjeman, the Armenian junk-shop owner a few blocks away. On Mondays, when her black cleaner Cleveland Ward came, she chatted to him all morning and gave him lunch in the garden. She acquired two kittens, who channelled her energy for love; buying their liver or Puss-e-Ration was an errand she enjoyed. There was the garden to look after. ‘What with the kittens and the garden and about twenty-two plants in pots, we have a kind of mixed farm,' she wrote to Jamie. Weekdays were a limbo between the weekends, when Dolf was at home all day and the two of them could go together to East Harlem in search of tropical fruit, or to the Greek quarter to buy vine leaves. Saturdays were ‘the dominant seventh' of the week, she wrote, describing this period of her married life: ‘but when all's said and done, the most important thing about Saturday is the knowledge that Sunday, the
Schlussakkord,
still lies ahead.' They read the Sunday papers at intervals throughout that ‘closing chord' of the week, so that by the evening, they were ‘pleasantly drugged with scraps of miscellaneous information, random quotations from the ephemeral oratory of the week, vague mental pictures of the shape Fifth Avenue women are going to assume in the next few weeks, horribly dodgy ways of messing up salad greens: and, above all, a sense of belonging.'

She was becoming unashamedly workshy. On hearing that Janet had given up a magazine job because it didn't give her enough responsibility, her response, expressed to Jamie, was ‘Amazing – fancy
wanting
more responsibility!'

She thought up an idea for a new television game-show, a one-woman show to ‘teach housewives not to be such cows and bores' – in other words, to introduce them to some of her own interests, such as carpentry and household repairs. Her idea was to do it once a week for $200, but the producers were so keen that they wanted her to do it twice a week for $400, and to sign her up for a year. ‘So I said,
“So lang soll ich leben”
and told them all to go jump in the lake,' she wrote to Jamie. ‘What is the use of earning $400 a week if you are too utterly pooped even to spend $200?' But she carried on doing her ‘guest spot' radio appearances: she needed the money, having long since spent the remaining MGM damages money on doctors', surgeons', dentists' and osteopaths' bills.

In May 1952, she and Dolf sailed to England for the third time. They met Jan's son-in-law Patrick, her future daughter-in-law Diana, and her first grandchild, Susanna Rance. They visited Robert, who was now at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was lovely to see them all; but each visit was too short – lunch, or tea, or an afternoon's walk along the Backs. She was truly now a visitor to the country which had once been her home. ‘That visit to England,' Dolf remembered, ‘felt like a farewell.' The last country house they visited, at Dolf's request, was Coleshill in Berkshire, built in 1650. Later in 1952 it burnt down, and Dolf saw this afterwards as a symbol.

It was Jan's last visit to England, and she seemed to know this, because on the journey back to New York she wrote one of her last poems, ‘Westbound Voyage', about the seven days of ‘de-creation' which were the preparation for saying goodbye:

When it comes to leaving a world which you have made

It is necessary to destroy it a little during the journey

To avoid the death of the heart.

You are given the statutory seven days:

Everything must be done in the proper sequence

But the order must be reversed.

The first day, you look back upon your world

And see that it was good. You rest, gathering

Strength for the de-creation.

The second day, the last-created things

Are the earliest to go: the boy, the spaniel,

And the old woman on the stair.

The third day, the fishes and the birds:

The peacock in his pride, the skylark rising,

The trout in the upland stream.

The fourth day, you quench the mild sun,

The penny moon, and all those constellations

Which belong to a northern sky.

The fifth day, roll up the fretting seas,

The flowered rocks, the hand-tented wheat-stooks

And the grass bright as baize.

The sixth day, the firmament is doomed –

That small sky whose marriage with grey waters

Gave birth to so much green.

The seventh day, darkness and light must go:

The short summer darkness, soft as a moleskin,

And the long, long light.

This is the worst of all. Boy, dog and bird

Will stay in your exiled heart: but how to recapture,

In the other world, that long, long summer light?

But when she got back to New York she found herself being swept up in a new burning cause: the Presidential Election in November, in which the Democrat Governor Adlai Stevenson was running against the Republican General Eisenhower. She wanted Stevenson to win, as did most enlightened, liberal Americans, and the strength of her feelings brought forth her first-ever political poetry. ‘Stevenson's Speech' expressed Stevenson's ability to be understood by people from all walks of life, while never speaking down to them. On the night before the election she wrote a poem for publication in anticipation of his victory, the last line of which was ‘They truly liked the General – but chose the caviar.' But the electorate chose the General, not ‘the caviar', and Jan, staying up all night with friends to hear the results, threw herself onto the floor and wept. She felt more than ever out of touch and sympathy with middle America. Ten years before she had had her finger firmly on the pulse of American feeling; now she could no longer find it.

Rachel Townsend, Tony's sister, had become Jan and Dolf's great friend. Whenever they were feeling nostalgic for Europe, they could visit her at 1 Beekman Place and play Canasta or Racing Demon and bask in her un-American accent, and Jan could hear news about the Maxtone Graham former in-laws and cousins, of whom she was very fond. Anne Talbot now lived downstairs: Rachel had taken her on as tenant of the lower floor of the Townsends' ‘duplex' apartment. Both Rachel and Anne provided a link with Jan's past, which she craved. As in the past, they were to prove invaluable friends in the coming months.

One morning in December Jan went to her typewriter and started clattering away on it; in three weeks out poured the first 118 pages of another book, ‘Cactus and Columbine' – the book about America she had been vaguely planning to write ever since she first arrived in 1940. Harcourt Brace, who had returned the manuscript of Jan's unfinished autobiography to her in February when she sent back their advance, were thrilled once again. If she could finish ‘Cactus and Columbine' by March 1953, it would be published in the autumn. ‘I've been writing away like mad at my new book,' Jan wrote to Janet just before Christmas. ‘I've done about 18,000 words and for the first time in my life I'm enjoying writing prose and finding it quite smooth & easy.' But it seems that breaking off to write that letter to Janet was a rash thing to do, because the book never got beyond those 18,000 words. Justifiably this time, Jan lost confidence in it.

In the fifth chapter there is a ring on Jan's doorbell, at 4.15. Who could it be, she wonders. It is too late for the mail, and too early for the garbage man. It could only be a Fuller Brush man, or someone trying to sell her set another set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.

‘Hullo?'

‘It's me,' said a pleasant feminine voice. ‘I hope I'm not too early.'

‘Not a bit,' I said, with the forced cordiality born of guilt.

I must have invited somebody to tea – but whom? Tea is a meal which has dropped itself from the rhythm of my gastric juices for twelve years.

The visitor turns out to be Mrs Miniver. This is the book's conceit: Jan meets Mrs Miniver again, and shows her around America. They discuss old times as they potter about New York making astute remarks to one another. Jan, it seemed, still could not quite lay the ghost of Mrs Miniver to rest: she needed to revive her once more, in order to exorcise her completely.

It was a good idea, in theory, but in Jan's hands in late 1952 it did not work. The unfinished typescript remains as stark proof of the decline in her prose writing, a pleasure to read if, but only if, you know and love her already. The book was supposed to be light – and it is full of her usual fertility of metaphor in describing the weather, and the seasons. But by this time in her life Jan had, in her heart, gone beyond lightness. Dialogue with Mrs Miniver in a supermarket queue was no longer her natural genre. If she had been honest, her meeting with Mrs Miniver would have been a bitter clash between two parts of herself, the book a riveting and truthful glimpse into the ‘conflicting roles' of her life. But this was supposed to be a travel book about America, and Jan was determined not to venture into the deep waters of her past. The result was relentless jollity.

It demonstrated, too, the extent to which Jan was still enslaved by Mrs Miniver. It was not just that she felt compelled to revive ‘the old girl', and to breathe new life into her – perhaps partly in response to the fatal damage done by MGM. She was also enslaved in that never again, after those few months on the Court page of
The Times
in 1938 and 1939, did she find the perfect form for her published prose. She never ceased to be good at writing letters – with them, she knew precisely who her audience was. But when it came to books, the vastness and variedness of the reading public daunted her, and she did not know whom she was addressing.

She had not realized at the time how perfect a vehicle for her writing the ‘Miniver' essays had been. They had not been her idea, so she had been free from the paralysing sense of total responsibility which dogged her later books. She had not even set out to write ‘a book': the essays had just turned into one, as if by magic. By creating a character who was part-fictional and part-herself, she had been spared the embarrassment of self-revelation while still managing to describe a version of her own life with pin-point accuracy. And her audience, the readers of
The Times,
had been select and ready-made. Having once found the ideal conditions for her prose and invented a natural character on whom to hang her observations, she could never easily move on.

So she gravitated back to talking, which she was good at and was paid for, and which required short bursts of wit and summonings-up of general knowledge in front of a microphone or a television camera. It was in this direction that her career was heading when in March 1953 she went for her regular six-monthly check-up with the surgeon, which always gave her ‘the most hellish jitters' beforehand. She was ‘perfectly OK', the surgeon told her, and she came out breathing freely with relief. But ‘by a macabre coincidence,' she wrote to Janet afterwards, ‘
The Miniver Story
was running at the neighbourhood theatre that same week … I did
NOT
go & see it. Indeed I never have and never want to. Too, too Pirandello, my deah…'