THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

against the abomination of desolation.
[end of Chapter 9]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 577]
10
Post- War and Post-Modern Literature
WHEN the Second World War ended in Europe in the summer of 1945, much of Britain was in ruins. Quite literally in
ruins. Its devastated industrial cities were not exactly the heaps of rubble that appalled post-war visitors to Germany
(Stephen Spender, for one, spoke of the ‘astonishing and total change, that incalculable shift from a soaring to a
sinking motion which distinguishes a dead body’ that disturbed him when revisiting Hamburg), but British cities as
diverse in character as Glasgow, Coventry, Canterbury, Bristol, Exeter, and Portsmouth had been torn apart by bombs.
London, in particular, had been universally pitted and scarred and was now marked by absences where familiar
landmarks had once stood. Whole districts were in ruins and most streets somehow bore the signs of blast, shrapnel,
fire-bombs, or high explosives. Although its greater monuments, such as St Paul’s, had survived largely intact, the
cathedral itself now rose hauntingly and, to some imaginative observers, resolutely above the shells of churches and
blasted office buildings. This broken London of bricks, façades, and dangerously exposed basements can now be only
recognized from paintings and photographs and from the cinematic exploitation of bomb-sites in films such as the two
early comedies made at the famous Ealing Studios, Charles Crichton’s rowdy Hue and Cry (1947) and Harry
Cornelius’s farce Passport to Pimlico (1949).
This landscape of ruins must also be recognized as forming an integral part of much of the literature of the late
1940s and the early 1950s. It was a landscape which provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits, and, in some
remoter and less-defined sense, for the ruin of Great Britain itself. It was also a ruin-scape that could sometimes
surprise its observers with joy. In 1953 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) ended her highly romantic and impressively
wide-ranging survey, Pleasure of Ruins with ‘A Note on New Ruins’, a note which briefly balanced a fascination with
the ‘catastrophic tipsy chaos’ of a British bomb-site against her earlier explorations of the historic wrecks of Greek
and Roman cities, of jungle-swamped Inca and Buddhist temples, and of ivy-mantled Gothic abbeys. Three years
before the appearance of Pleasure of Ruins,
[p. 578]
Macaulay’s novel The World my Wilderness had focused on outsiders and exiles, all of them ‘displaced’ persons,
finding the ruins of London a solace and a refuge. Her London, as her choice of words indicates, is both distinctly
post-War and post-Eliotic: ‘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, and here your feet are set . . . „Where are the roots that clutch, what
branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess ...” But you can say, you can guess, that
it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and
nowhere else.’ Macaulay’s quotation from The Waste Land serves to reinforce the view commonly held by artists and
writers of the period that the strange juxtapositions of flowers and dust, of unexpected, wild gardens and shattered,
empty houses, and of the familiar seen in an unfamiliarly surreal way through a broken wall had somehow been
prepared for by Modernist experiments with fragmentation.
Amongst writers whose reputation had been established well before 1945, Macaulay was far from alone in
seeing the immediately post-war period as one which required the reassembling of fragments of meaning (she was
herself to return to a landscape of classical ruins and to jarring private experience in her novel The Towers of
Trebizond in 1956). The Second World War had provided an additional means of focus for the fiction of Anglo-Irish
novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973). Throughout her earlier work, most notably in her novel The Last September
(1929) and her memoir Bowen’s Court (1942), she had explored the tensions implicit in the history of her landed
family and the divided loyalties of the increasingly dispossessed Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. When she wrote of
England in the 1930s, as she did with supreme assurance in her most Jamesian novel, The Death of the Heart (1938),
she took as her theme the loss of innocence in the face of shallow sophistication and the flashy glamour of
metropolitan values. The sometimes painful rift between the perceptions of children and those of adults was reexamined
very differently in her penultimate novel, The Little Girls (1964). It was, however, in the wartime
collections of short stories, Look at all those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover (1945), and, above all, in her novel
The Heat of the Day (1949) that Bowen exploited the fictional potential of an upper-class Irish woman’s perception of