Terrible Liberties

After the fun of war the austerities of peace. And the civilians…how do they cope? We look for an answer in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness; it does not disappointment us.

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Travelling down the pages of this novel, a psychologist hails us at the opening of a chapter; a sign to turn off the realist road, to ride along the lanes of symbol and allegory, and drive through a metaphysical countryside that is forever living, growing, bursting, choking, suffocating, quickly slowly dying mulching out. We are talking about patterns of growth and decay repeating themselves endlessly: ideas are born, live, they die. Metaphysics reborn in the 20th century, when the core problems were believed invisible to the ordinary eye; our behaviours not ends in themselves but symptoms of deeper causes, usually malevolent; the entangled growth of a person’s history, hidden in the jungle of their past, strangling the free vitality of their soul. Memories suppressed, the natural flow of the spirit warped, our thoughts are made rigid and ritualistic by a mind too powerful for its own health; the consciousness perverted, we live under its authoritarian control, its wild and wilful imagination; or so one very influential story went. It was all in the mind, that locked room for which only Doctor Freud had the key. The Marxists believed in economics; the Evolutionary Biologists in Rousseau’s mythic past which, typical of their time, they turned into a perpetual present; modern man a Neanderthal in shirt and tie.

“We are in hell now,” he said, staring apprehensively about him. “Hell is where I am, Lucifer and all his legions are in me. Fire creeps on me from all sides; I am trapped in the prison of my sins; I cannot get out, there is no rescue possible, for I have shut myself from God in the hell of my own making. I cannot move my limbs, I cannot raise my hands to God, I cannot call to him from my place of darkness. The flames press on; they will consume my body, but my soul will live on in hell, for ever damned for I have turned from God and he must turn from me. O, the way’s dark and horrid! I cannot see: shall I have no company? O yes, my sins; they run before me to fetch fire from hell. Trapped, trapped, trapped; there’s no hope.”

Psychology had brought Hell down from the heavens and placed it inside the human psyche; the blasted churches of this novel’s landscape reminding us of the discipline’s triumph. The priest is mad. Entombed by his church when the Germans bombed it, he has lost his mind, and preaches a religion few can accept, so odd it appears to the modern sensibility. After this apocalyptic rant - his own therapeutic session -  a fellow cleric will quietly lead him away, embarrassed for his colleague he apologises for the interruption; a medieval prophet no longer a leader of men but a lunatic on the loose.

Barbary believes him. She is hearing a truth. This girl talks not in metaphors. She knows Hell’s torments, its terrible punishments living inside her every day. In part due a religious phase, common to most teenagers, this belief is also the outcome of her own special history; the years running completely free have turned her emotions feral, while her painful wartime experiences and her current exile in London, far from the mother she adores, have increased their intensity until they have become insufferable. The priest’s sermon, made vivid and truthfully concrete by an undisciplined imagination, a straight description of her own pain-racked soul: she is living in the Devil’s furnace.

To the psychologist the solution is clear: Barbary must free herself from these terrible memories, then she will be well. It sounds like standard psychoanalysis, though without the stress on fantasy, repression and hysteria (the author recognising that real things do happen in this world). Barbary, however, doesn't want to be saved by this professional; escaping his talk, those plausible theories, she returns to London, where she falls deep into the underworld. A crude attempt at salvation has exacerbated the original sin. To live in the wild is to flee the attractions of the zoo.

The professional’s failure is part of a wider misconception. Sir Gulliver Deniston wants to civilise his child, whom he believes has been neglected by his ex-wife, who lives a carefree existence in the South of France. Sir Gulliver wishes to turn Barbary into a well-brought up haute-bourgeois; though he has no idea how this can be done, having never tamed a wild animal before. He assumes that just by being in his house and following its rules Barbary will conform to its conventions, its civility. Such crude behaviourism is simple-minded ignorance. To adapt to this life the child should already have been exposed to its conditioning. Barbary has had none. Allowed to run free by a bohemian mother, she has played with all sorts of ragamuffins, as well as the thugs of the Resistance; she has seen terrible things. Today she is suffering the consequences, one of many her seduction by a German soldier (it may have been rape). To change such a personality is hard work. It is not simply to swap one dress for another. Old patterns of behaviour have first to be broken, new patterns of feeling formed; the new clothes must be made not bought. Gully Deniston is too civilised for that sort of thing: he consumes people he doesn't manufacture them.

The limits of the respectable are here revealed. To belong to the elite is to live instinctively by social convention, the pressure of conformity alone enough to make members submit to its rules and quiet hypocrisies. This is achieved automatically; there is no need for a stern disciplinarian, the individual relied upon to learn the atmosphere, and imbibe it without fuss or difficulty. The result? Everyone is tolerant and nice, but also largely indifferent to the needs of others, especially when these needs are demanding of time and energy; the haute bourgeois not used to making an effort with people - this has already done by others, by nanny, school, the air cadet corp. But some characters, Barbary is one of them, need an enormous amount of attention. Yet for a while now she hasn’t been receiving any attention at all.

Helen is a free-spirit; beautiful, artistic, scholarly, she is a don with the sensibility of a courtesan. Once she overwhelmed Barbary with attention and love. This was a mistake. Helen’s nature is to be fickle; an adept of the moment, she is constantly chasing her caprices, which consume her totally for the time they last. In France she falls in love with Maurice, they marry, and then, after his death, she follows her own intensely egoistical urges, satisfying her desires for luxury, literature and sex. Barbary has to look after herself. The results we already know. The charisma of his powerful character - the combination of sex and intelligence captures all men and most women; Pamela, the jealous second wife, the exception - captivates Barbary, who is hurt by Helen’s distance, and devastated by their separation. 

Helen and Gully are highly civilised people who belong to different sides of the civilised life; though both share the indifference - detachment the foundation of their civility - Helen’s arising from the voluptuous egoism of the sybarite. This lack of care comes very close to ending Barbary’s life. Gully blames himself. Helen takes on more of the blame. She is probably right; allowing Barbary so much freedom has exposed her to the horrors of the wilderness; there’s that unpleasant sex, the brutality of friends, then the murder of the step-father, with its traumatic effects on her relationship with Helen, who enjoying a new lover, and keen to remove Barbary from the home, too readily accepts Gully’s unreasonable request for his daughter’s return.

Helen is irresistible. Back in London to look after the dangerously ill Barbary she once again bewitches Gully, who is overwhelmed by her beauty, her charm, her cleverness; undone by her sensuality they make love in his study. It cannot continue. This brilliant virago scintillates but also causes disquiet, unrest, pain; while her irresponsibility and selfishness offends. Richie, in conscious rebellion against his mother’s lifestyle, desires the straight-jacket of a rigid respectability, and Gully… Gully is to reject her; his moral obligation towards his second wife and their children must, he decides, outweigh sexual enjoyment. Helen is to return to France, after this brief unsettling raid. Fortunately, not that much damage has been done; although when Gully tries to maintain his rights - he tries to keep Barbary in England - Helen exposes him as a cuckold who has brought up a bastard. Helen is a wonderful woman, but she is dangerous; the proprieties not strong enough to contain her will, which is enormous, and will not be denied. The break is irrevocable.

“Your France. The France of the comfortable collaborators and the disreputable maquis. The France of the rich opportunists and of the lawless criminals with which you let our daughter mix. … When you stayed on in France with Michel, it wasn’t only me and Richie you were deserting, but the decency and integrity of the ordinary person. He was a collaborationist with the enemy occupying his country, with those disgusting barbarians who tortured and massacred and enslaved and abolished freedom and the rule of law. You lived with him, and tolerated the barbarians too. That shocked me more profoundly than your desertion.”

“I see. But, you know, Maurice never collaborated, in the sense you mean. He never betrayed anyone to the Germans or the Vichy police. He even sheltered escaped allied prisoners. All he did was to live in an occupied country and keep on amicable terms with its occupiers. Was there much harm in that?”

Helen doesn’t respect the boundaries. No limits are to be placed on the instincts. Feels like a gamble? Off to Monte Carlo to lose a lot of cash. Bored at home? She will bed Lucien, her dead husband’s cousin. She has no care about what others think, their opinions unimportant. Helen is free of all censure and has no fear, and guided by her own moral maps she chooses her own way, along the paths of intellectual fulfilment and a rigorous hedonism; though there remains a core of goodness: she will not deliberately hurt another person. Her character is enormously liberating. We want to be close to her!1 The fools we are. Helen is extremely selfish. Always she will hurt those she loves, because they expect more than she can give; extras in her stage play, for a few hours she treats us like the main act; someone new then appears; and left in the wings, we feel let down, are forlorn.

There are natural limits to freedom; fences surround the wilderness: Maurice is killed by the resistance, while Barbary almost dies, when running away from the police. Freedom crosses the lines of safety. Brought up wild the wilderness has entered Barbary’s soul, making her egotistical and selfish; she shows no respect for other people, whose property she freely steals. Taken up by thieves, prostitutes and deserters Barbary conforms to their antisocial ways; though she has a detachment impossible for them - their lives are for her a role, which she can discard (just like mother…). Such aloofness creates an aura that protects her from the usual fare of such company: drink and debauchery. Nevertheless, despite these prophylactics Barbary will be caught out by this life. She must fall. Her own civility her undoing: Mrs Cox, the cook, asks her brother, a police officer, to keep an eye on the master’s daughter…

Such characters never collapse completely. Their civilisation protects them, in the end. There is always a second chance. After the accident Helen recognises that she has given Barbary too much liberty. Tomorrow she will take her to France, and stay with her in Paris, for a few months of each year, when she attends art school. She will trim back the wilderness.

The Wall was being examined, its great bastions identified and cleared, their tiles and brickwork dated. Roman and medieval pots and coins were gathered up and housed; civilised intelligence was at work among the ruins. Before long, cranes and derricks would make their appearance, sites would be cleared for rebuilding, tottering piles would be laid low, twisting flights of steps destroyed. One day the churches would be dealt with, taken down, or mended and built up.

The wilderness is being reclaimed. Those wild days of war are over. Now is the time for an accounting, and a clear-sighted view of the damage done, which assuages the hurt and guilt; Barbary confesses her knowledge of Maurice’s murder; Helen admits she has always suspected it. Not the German, not sex, not the Freudian fairy tale, no, the cause of Barbary’s pain, the stimulus to her barbarous ways, has been her inability to admit an awful truth to the mother she loves, creating a distance that is unbearable. Helen has been the problem all along. So carefree, so charismatic, so distant; nobody wants to disturb the world this beautiful woman creates; and anyway they are helpless to do so: Helen too powerful a character to let reality enter her life. Only disaster can give Barbary the strength to speak the terrible truth; her exile in London, the increase of her criminal tendencies, and the almost fatal fall have left her a wreck with nothing to lose: she safely reveals her secret. Helen’s response is majestic. The past will be forgiven and forgotten, tomorrow is a fresh start. Back to France! 

For a while London is turned into the scrublands of the Mediterranean, the city’s ruins the desolate countryside where Barbary fights her own resistance war against authority, those civilising attempts of her father. We suspect symbolism, our psychologist equating the bush-filled courts and weed-littered lanes with subconscious passions and instinctual drives, themselves a metaphor for the riotous London of the Blitz and its hangover aftermath.2 Set after the war the novel suggests that Barbary’s rebellion is anachronistic, the wild times over, only the crooks and misfits now play amongst these ruined streets and squares.3 Misfits? Why yes; Barbary, like her mother, is too independent and self-generating to be merely epiphenomena of Hitler’s war; their freedoms, existing outside external stimuli, growing out of their own being. The war may even have hemmed them in, displacing that natural liberty into areas that are inherently limiting and oppressive: the collaboration to end in an uneasy silence, Barbary’s unhappy exile. This girl a misfit with a bad conscience.

While the war lasted life was comfortable with the Krauts: Helen, no moralist, is indifferent to the simple moral conventions and the consciences they create; it is the luxuries of the mind and the senses that count for her, no matter who the source. But such ease comes with a tragic cost; when the Germans leave Maurice is killed by the Resistance, Barbary their confederate. In wartime France the liberties of the bohemian life became complicated, turned ugly and end horribly; both Helen and Barbary to suffer from its gruesome aftereffects. Gully, when he brings his daughter back to England, also brings this spirit of the French occupation into London, for which he is wholly unprepared; his recent existence a recovery from the aggressive sybaritism of Helen, his war a quiet reformation into full-blown respectability, with his young and beautiful and highly conventional wife, Pamela.

Helen and Gulliver (and Pamela), these names resonate with literary history, although here used with touches of irony: Gulliver looks Lilliputian, while Helen, the bohemian bed her battlefield, is the warrior queen forced to suffer an armistice because of the occupation. A knowing comment on the author’s transvaluation of the wartime experience, overturning what had now become the commonplace wisdom that it was a period of Bacchanalian excess?4 For the free spirits this was a time of compromise; while for those in the haute bourgeoisie it was a rearguard action to keep up their rectitude when faced with a prodigious temptation; the scenes between Helen and Gulliver - Gully losing his self-control, Helen triumphant, then forced into an act of pettiness by his intransigence - a study in microcosm of the entire period 1939-50. This interpretation of The World My Wilderness segueing into a more conventional reading that it records the spirit of Austerity, that post-war clamp down on social and sexual liberty, when the bohemians were exiled abroad.5

An excess of freedom has caused a crisis. Helen is right to blame herself. Barbary made guilty by association for Maurice’s death, Helen’s natural egoism then froze her daughter out; Gully’s London invitation a simple way to solve an irritating difficulty, a psychological itch. Barbary’s almost fatal accident reconciles mother and child; the old feelings come back and are fused together by that confession. Helen forced to revaluate her own life, decides to settle down, for a little while.

So men’s will to recovery strove against the drifting wilderness to halt and tame it; but the wilderness might slip from their hands, from their spades and trowels and measuring rods, slip darkly away from them, seeking the primeval chaos and old night which had been before Londinium was, which would be when cities were ghosts haunting the ancestral dreams of memory.

The Blitz massively enlarged the badlands, extending them over much of the City, to leave only the ghosts of business and finance to haunt the barely perceptible streets, whose ruins are ruled by pimps, prostitutes and wrong'uns of all sorts. Pirates are running the place now. For the solidly civilised - there is no trace of bohemianism in Ritchie - the City has become a scary spot; they might be mugged by members of the underworld, or, worse, they may lose themselves in the labyrinth of overgrown courts… The psychologist has returned, to talk symbol, archetype and the unconscious.

Shuddering a little, he took the track across the wilderness towards St. Paul’s. Behind him the questionable chaos of broken courts and lanes lay sprawled under the October mist, and the shells of churches gaped like lost myths, and the jungle pressed in on them, seeking to cover them up.

“Questionable chaos.” There is an order, then, to these wild places? Certainly, for where civilisation exists urbanity never wholly disappears. The old order has been destroyed, and is replaced by another sort of life, with its own meanings and modes of living that attracts a special type of the civilised and sophisticated. Helen is no simple hedonist. Her wildness attracts, for sure; but there is more… She offers a different kind of existence; it is embodied in her relaxed and tolerant personality, her grace, her magnificent intelligence that charms us all; this is a woman attuned to the moment, to the senses, to feeling, to atmosphere; each day a performance, the first night of a new play. This woman has her own morality. In Helen’s world freedom is more important than social conformity, but where a sense of honour, individually defined, keeps everybody in check. This is a world of noble ladies and chivalric knights, who play by rules that are felt rather than learned - they are not imposed by some external code or managed by an exogenous authority - and who navigate the culture by a spirit that is allusive, improvised and finely-tuned. It is a wonderful world for those who belong, though it is also unstable and extremely dangerous, it is easy for the beginner and the fool to fall (it also has its own repressions: “the jungle pressed in on them, seeking to cover them up”).6 Only the few, only really Helen, can survive unscathed; her gigantic egotism an (almost) impenetrable armour. Bohemia.7 It is wonderful! exciting! intoxicating! It can kill you too. Ritchie knows this, leaving the novel with a shudder.

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1.  A comparative study with Mrs Arlbery from Fanny Burney’s Camilla would make an interesting read. The one obvious difference, that defines the centuries, is the centrality of sex to Helen; a sign of the times or the conventions of the novel is not clear. 

One of the odd aspects of 18th century literature - think of how many titles are just a character’s name - is the solipsism of its people. They can’t escape the prison cells of their own personalities. Thus Camilla, shut off completely from the rest of humanity, even her closest family, comes close to destroying herself through an inability to communicate her deepest thoughts and feelings. We see resemblances to Barbary, though in Camilla’s case the cult of sensibility appears to be the cause.

2.  See my pieces on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Afternoon and Henry Green’s Caught.

3.  Contrast with Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, where the short period between the two armistices became a time of sexual liberation (see my Sprezzatura).

4.  The stereotypes are exhibited in Marghanita Laski’s popular novel To Bed with Grand Music; the heroine is a female Casanova.

5.  See my piece on Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger.

6.  Though called a Portrait of Youth Camilla is actually an acute study of this kind of society: adolescents, especially when in love, behaving like knights and ladies. What is particularly striking in this novel is the tension between the “aristocratic” feeling of the two central characters and the moral teaching - those external codes - of the parson and scholar. The introduction of a learned morality into this world of sensibility destabilises it; the necessarily crude maxims and the analytic intelligence disabling that sense of touch - informed by instinct and guided by judgement - intrinsic to intelligent feeling. Not the “flighty” Camilla but the educated sobersides the danger in this book.

7.  In The Situation of the Novel Bernard Bergonzi writes that in the Sword of Honour trilogy Evelyn Waugh destroyed his own myth of the gentleman, showing him weak and ineffectual and easily corrupted by the modern world. Rose Macaulay, in contrast, still has faith in this myth: the aristocrats can survive the 20th century.