The World My Wilderness

Book 15: Virago Modern Classics

by Rose Macaulay, Penelope Fitzgerald

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the War. Sent by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Barbary has spent her childhood years in the sunshine of Provence. During the War, she ran wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal and resistance. In peacetime the young woman has been taken away from all she knows and placed into the drab austerity of postwar London life. Confused and unhappy, she discovers the flowering bomb craters around St Paul's Cathedral. Here, in the bombed heart of London, with the outcasts living on the edge of society, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.

Release date: February 8, 2018

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 188

Sample

Rose Macaulay was born in 1881, and died in 1958. As a young woman she went bathing by moonlight with Rupert Brooke, and she lived long enough to protest, as a well-known author and critic, against the invasion of Korea. The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, when she was thought to have given up fiction, not having written a novel for nearly ten years.

The book disturbed her readers, because it was not what they expected. The most successful of her early novels had been social satires. They were delightful to read, and still are, brilliantly clear-sighted without being malicious (or at least more malicious than necessary) but they took a detached view; humanity was so misguided that one must either laugh or cry, and Rose had felt it best to laugh. The World My Wilderness showed that the power of ridicule, after all, was not the most important gift she had.

Rose Macaulay herself was most characteristically English, tall, angular, and given to wearing flat tweed caps, or hats like tea cosies – English, too, in her gaiety and wit which, at heart, was melancholic. But almost any conclusion you came to about her would be wrong. From the ages of six to thirteen she had grown up with her brothers and sisters in a small fishing town on the Genoese coast, and this interlude of scrambling about the Mediterranean hills and foreshore was as important to her as all her English education. Again, Rose was often thought to be sexless, or, as Rosamond Lehmann put it, ‘sexless though not unfeminine’. But in fact she had, at the age of thirty-six, fallen irretrievably in love with a married man, Gerald O’Donovan, and in spite of much heart-searching she never broke with her lover till the day of his death. Both these episodes have a good deal to do with the writing of The World My Wilderness.

The book’s seventeen-year-old heroine Rose herself described as ‘rather lost and strayed and derelict’. Barbary Deniston has grown up in wartime Occupied France, only half attended to by her worldly, sensual charmer of an English mother. This mother, Helen, has been divorced from Deniston, and her second husband, ‘a thriving and amiable French collaborator’, is dead. Meanwhile Barbary and her stepbrother have lived in and out of the house as children of the maquis, trained by the Resistance in sabotage and petty thieving. Like Auden’s boy with a stone, Barbary has never heard of any world where promises were kept. When she is sent from her fishing village to the respectable Deniston relatives in London, she is doubly lost. Like seeking like, she escapes from pallid WC2 to join the drifters and scroungers in the bombed area round St Paul’s, where shrubs and green creeping things ran about a broken city. ‘Here, its cliffs and chasms and caves seemed to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world.’ Ironically enough she begins housekeeping at once, tidying and cleaning the gaping ruins of a church. She is not a wanderer by nature, it is only that she needs a home that she can trust.

In Rose Macaulay’s earlier novels, notably Crewe Train (1926) and They Were Defeated (1932), there are young girls of Barbary’s sort, precociously adult, and yet clinging for reassurance to childhood. Many have names which could be either masculine or feminine (Denham, Julian, Evelyn), as though rejecting all society’s definitions. All of them are unwilling exiles from some lost paradise. They remember sunshine and freedom, as Rose remembered her Italy. But in this story of the nineteen forties, the world that Barbary longs for and looks back to is a black-marketing France. The paradise itself is corrupt. And the civilisation to which she is packed off is an equally shabby affair. Deniston, the honourable man, is an odd man out in post-war London. His son Richie describes himself as a ‘gentle, civilised, swindling crook’, who by bending the law a little – as all his friends do – hopes to make himself a comfortable life. Barbary is no doubt right, on the beach at Collioure, to examine the word civilisation ‘and to reject it, as if it were mentioned too late’. In any society, she will remain a barbarian. The novel’s painful question is: what have we done to our children?

The war years had brought deep personal trouble to Rose. In 1939 she was responsible for a serious car crash in which her lover was injured. In 1941 her flat was bombed and she lost nearly everything she possessed. In 1942 Gerald O’Donovan died, and Rose entered her own waste land of remorse. How much could be forgotten, and how much could she forgive herself? In spite of this, or more probably because of it, she is more compassionate in this novel than in any other. To be self-satisfied, to be stupid, to be cruel (Rose had always said) is undesirable, if we are to consider ourselves civilised, but at the same time she was not at all easily shocked. Asked on one occasion by a question-master whether she would prefer death or dishonour she replied: ‘Dishonour, every time.’ And The World My Wilderness is remarkable for the pleas in mitigation she makes for all her characters. Helen has no conscience, it seems to have been left out of her, but she creates pleasure for others. Deniston is stiff, bland and resentful, but his integrity must count for something. Richie is a young aesthete who prefers to withdraw rather than to be too much involved, but then he has been fighting through three years of ‘messy, noisy and barbaric war’. Mrs Cox, the housekeeper, can’t distinguish – which of us can? – between interference and what, to her, are good intentions. Even Pamela, Deniston’s second wife, wholesome tweedy Pamela (‘all Pamela’s clothes were good, and of the kind known as cheaper in the end’) – Pamela the young committeewoman, not at all Rose’s favourite kind of person, redeems herself by suffering with dignity. If there is a responsibility to judge these people the author is asking us to share it.

In the same way, every turn of the story brings a different confrontation, genial against sceptical, honourable against amoral, will against emotion, rough against smooth, wild against tamed. And these encounters, too, are left unresolved. In the closing chapters, for instance, Helen comes back to London. At the Denistons’ house she takes command, a supremely inconvenient guest. Her motives, as we have to admit, are generous. But poor Pamela has to hold her own against the sumptuous intruder. The contest of possessiveness, jealousy, and genuine love is so finely balanced that most readers would be hard put to it to say exactly where their sympathies lie. Rose has written the novel in terms of comedy, but all the satirist’s air of knowing what’s best for everybody has gone. Indeed there is, perhaps, no ‘best’ for any of them.

Rose Macaulay liked to insist that ideas for novels came to her as places – ‘backgrounds’ would hardly be a strong enough word for them. In The World my Wilderness (if we take the ‘respectable, smoke-dark houses’ of London as a kind of negation of place) we have three of them – Collioure in the South of France, Arshaig in the western Highlands, and the wilderness itself. Each corresponds to its own moral climate. Collioure is described in the most seductive terms. ‘The cool evening wind rustled in the cork forest, crept about the thymey maquis; the sea, drained of light, was a wash of blue shadow, sparked by the lights of fishing boats putting out for the night’s catch.’ By day, the Villa Fraises offers serene warmth and relaxation for all comers, but always with a hint of excess. The garden is ‘crowded’, Helen ‘lounged her days away’, the most striking of her pictures is ‘a large nude who was a French mayor, reclining on a green sofa with a blue plate of strawberries in his hand; his flesh tones were superb’. Arshaig is equally beautiful, but austere, with misty dawns and steel-pale water, and at the shooting lodge are a whole family of Barbary’s relations, ‘formidably efficient at catching and killing Highland animals’. But in saying this Rose reminds us that there has also been killing and hunting – of men as well as animals – in the forests of Collioure, ‘savageries without number’, from the days of the Saracens to the Gestapo and the Resistance. And on the beach there Barbary and Raoul had stood watching the fish in the nets as they struggled, leaped and died.

Barbary herself becomes a creature of the wilderness, the ruins of the city of London. In 1950 the rubble was still lying where it had fallen, carpeted with weeds and inhabited by rats and nesting birds. The whole area fascinated Rose – how much, can be felt in the lyrical opening to Chapter 18. To her they were the new catacombs. ‘I spent much of today in the ruins round St Paul’s, which I like… part of my new novel is laid in this wrecked scene,’ she wrote to Gilbert Murray.* Many people must still remember, as I do, the alarming experience of scrambling after her that summer (she made no distinction of age on her expeditions) and keeping her spare form just in view as she shinned undaunted down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window. Foxgloves, golden charlock and loosestrife were flourishing everywhere they could take root in the stones, but Rose did not sentimentalise over the wild flowers. It was not man’s business, in her view, to abandon what he has won from nature. She was studying obliteration.

Descended from historians, trained as a historian herself, she makes the ruins into something more than a metaphor for Barbary’s desolate state; they give the novel a dimension in time. They are still alive with the indignation of all the generations who have lived and done business in the city, or worshipped in its fallen churches. ‘The ghosts of churches burnt in an earlier fire, St Olave’s and St John Zachary’s… the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks had drunk’ all haunt their old precincts, even under the midday sun, so do the long-dead clerics and shopkeepers themselves. When Barbary is on the run, the phantoms of five centuries of London crowd together to watch, from their vanished buildings, the pitiful end of the chase. They are not sympathetic, they want her caught. History, as might be expected, is on the side of authority.

At the end of the book Richie is seen alone on the brink of the ‘wrecked scene’, and the squalor in front of him makes him feel sick. He reflects that ‘we are in rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones’, quoting The Waste Land, from which Rose took one of the novel’s epigraphs (she wrote the first one herself). But The Waste Land is also a fitful quest for spiritual healing, and Richie, in the end, takes the track from Moorgate Station ‘across the wilderness towards St Paul’s’. This is one of several hints in the book of a religious solution, or, at least, of curiosity about one, even though Barbary and Raoul perceive that ‘if there is anything, there must be hell. But one supposes that there is nothing.’

The World My Wilderness is, in fact, not a pessimist’s book – heartfelt, yes, but pessimistic, no. However faulty the main characters may be, there is one striking fact about them; their mistakes are not the result of caring nothing about each other, but of caring too much. It is because he still loves Helen that Deniston fails to forgive her, and Helen herself learns in the end not only how much she loves her daughter, but a way to help her. ‘She must have sunshine, geniality, laughter, love; and if she goes to the devil she shall at least go happily, my poor little savage.’ This is probably the best that Helen can do. And if the inhabitants of this earth, in spite of the mess, the slaughter and the desolation they cause, can give up so much for each other, they must be redeemable. In the last resort, Rose Macaulay thought so. And she was, as her novel shows, too much interested in human beings to lose faith in them.

 

Penelope Fitzgerald, London, 1982 

The villa, facing south, stood above the little town and port, on the slope between the sea and the Forêt de Sorède. It was strawberry pink, with green shutters shaped like leaves, and some green bogus windows and shutters, with painted ladies looking out of them, but most of the windows were real, and had balconies full of shrubs and blue pots and drying bathing suits and golden cucumbers in piles. There was a flat terraced roof with vine trellises on it, and outside the villa stone steps climbed up to the roof. The garden was crowded with shrubs and flowers and orange and lemon trees, and pomegranates and magnolias and bougainvilleas and vines. A veranda ran across the south front of the house; behind it were the long, cool, shady rooms, with whitewashed walls and floors of small glossy dark-red tiles, spread with bright striped mats. The walls of the largest room were painted with a dado of sea and creatures of the deep, such as dolphins, tritons, mermaids eating honey-comb, sea horses and gaily striped fish. There were a few modern paintings; the most imposing was a large nude who was a French mayor, reclining on a green sofa with a blue plate of strawberries in his hand; his flesh tones were superb. This nude, whose name was Charles Michel, had been the builder and first owner of the Villa Fraises, but was now dead. So was his son Maurice, the second owner, who had collaborated mildly but prosperously from 1940 to 1945, and had thereafter been found drowned in the bay, leaving the Villa Fraises in the possession of his English wife, an artist who had painted the pictures in the room, and had lived with him in it since the fall of France had left her stranded with her ten years old daughter at Collioure.

Owing to having collaborated, however mildly, the Michels had lived quite well, and had been able to ameliorate also the lives of many of their neighbours, including some of the local maquis, but the maquis, a thankless tribe, had held this against them when the hour struck and the liberating troops swept into Provence. The Villa Fraises was under a cloud; after its owner’s death, his widow had been spared retribution owing to her having more than once sheltered escaped allied prisoners waiting to cross the Pyrenees, and to the well-meant, if somewhat jejune, activities of her daughter and stepson in the juvenile fringes of the maquis. Still, as relict of the collaborating M. Michel, who was suspected (unjustly) of having betrayed fugitives and Resistance members to the Vichy police in Perpignan in return for petrol and other conveniences, Madame Michel had found herself in an embarrassing position. Fortunately she was not easily embarrassed.

A large, handsome, dissipated, detached and idle woman, more interested in classical literature and the pleasures of the gaming table than in painting, which, she found, demanded more application than she was prepared, in these days, to exert, she was inclined to lounge her days away, playing any game for any stakes with any one at hand, idly translating Greek comedies into French, playing with her infant son, or merely reading for pleasure. On this mid-April afternoon she lay in a hammock in the garden, among oleanders and statues, while the mother of Maurice Michel, who was paying a visit to the Fraises, sat erect and black-weeded on the veranda, netting. Madame Michel was thin and patriotic; she had curled white hair and a tight mouth; the generous, ample curves, the lounging ease, the brightly coloured clothes, the absorption in literature and in games of chance, of the bereaved mistress of her son, she found exasperating. (As his mistress she still regarded her daughter-in-law, since she had a husband still alive in London.) And more than exasperating that Maurice had left her the Fraises. Madame Michel, a good anglophobe, disliked the British, who lacked literature, culture, language and manners, had run away from the boches in 1940 and left France to face them, and now gave themselves the airs of liberators, when any liberating that had not been done by the French themselves had been the work of the Americans. Nor did Madame Michel care for Helen’s pictures; she particularly disliked the nude mayor, her late husband, a fancy portrait which had, with the aid of a photograph and of Maurice’s descriptions, achieved a startling likeness. It was characteristic of Maurice to have permitted and enjoyed this portrait; it had been to him, his mother felt, the reaffirmation of the alliance he had always had with his jolly, ribald father against her, for whom he had never much cared. For Maurice had all his life liked jolly, ribald people. He had not much liked his first wife, a girl from a convent school with whom he had made a marriage of convenience at the age of thirty, and whose brief life he had never permitted unduly to hamper his own. He had seen her features and expression repeated in their son Raoul, who had always, therefore, a little irritated him. His own, on the other hand, were evident in the infant Roland. It was to arrange for Raoul’s future that his grandmother was, and how reluctantly, visiting the Villa Fraises.

‘And where,’ enquired Madame Michel, her sharp voice, speaking the French of Bordeaux, sawing the slumbrous, syringa-sweet garden air like the zirring of crickets, ‘is Raoul all this afternoon?’

‘I don’t precisely know.’ The voice from the hammock was deep, slow, lazy, and spoke the French of the ateliers of the rive gauche, where its owner had picked it up as a girl. ‘He and Barbary – they are out together with their friends from morning till night, and often from night till morning. They are prob. . .