The best critical books offer us sparkling lenses for making sense of literature. If we are lucky, they also introduce us to new material that interests and delights. In rare cases they alter the map of literary history, establishing where certain cultural movements begin and end. Leo Mellor's new book easily meets the first two of these criteria, defining a new genre, the literature of the British urban bombsite of World War II, and illustrating it with a set of compelling close readings. Only in failing to aspire to a strong critical thesis does the book fall short.
The bombsite is more than a place: it is an imagined space with a long history in British culture. Mellors traces the genesis of the idea from late Victorian speculative fiction, to Zeppelin-inspired writing in World War I, to prophetic popular novels in the interwar years, to the widespread expressions of vulnerability occasioned by the unprecedented civilian bombings of the Spanish Civil War. But his main concern is with literature responding to the actual bombing of London between September 1940 and May 1941. In much the same way as the trench emblematizes the war of 1914–18, the bombed city is a popular metonym for the war against Fascism. The bombsites offered stunning visual effects. Indeed, they “literalized” some of modern art's most bizarre nonrepresentational images: in Stephen Spender's words, they presented “the strangest conjunctions of phenomena in the most unexpected places” (quoted, 101), combinations that might have been hatched in the mind of Salvador Dali. They also recalled the formal structures of modernist literature: arrays of fragments that call out for salvaging and reordering. Finally, the ruins were laden with ready-made symbolism. For instance, wild flowers from far-flung places, their seeds imported on the boots of foreign soldiers, germinated and grew in the rubble, creating a jungle that seemed both invasive and consoling. As Mellors explains, the job of describing this setting inspired writers to turn to the resources of surrealism and T. S. Eliot's modernism. They reproduced startling analogues; they wrote about “waste lands” and the shoring up of fragments; they celebrated the branches “grow[ing] / Out of . . . stony rubbish” (quoted, 176). In technique, they played with Eliot's practices of cutting and citation, his archaeological arrangements, and his “mythical method.”
Highlights include an interpretation of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (1943), a novel conceived while Greene served as an air raid warden during the Blitz. There, Mellors explains, the devastated London landscape serves as objective correlative for the protagonist's trauma-induced amnesia. Another is a sustained reading of David Jones's The Anathemata (1952), a difficult allegorical poem exploring the parallels between World Wars I and II. Also very useful is Mellors's treatment of the poems of J. H. Hendry, which reinvigorates Eliot's “mythical method” by putting the debris of Guernica and London in dialectical tension with Greek, Roman, and Norse legends. But Mellors's finest contribution may be his treatment of Rose Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness (1950). He explains the novel's use of many familiar modernist devices—its juxtaposition of fragments, its symbols and allusions, and description of a palimpsestic landscape—and also how its form mirrors its content, positioning the reader alongside the book's heroine in their efforts to “read the ruins.” Thanks to this exegesis, Macaulay's neglected novel may earn a well-deserved place on the syllabi of future courses in the literature of war.
Readers will also appreciate being introduced to more minor writers: to the fireman William Sansom, for instance, whose stories recount the exploits of firefighters, drawing liberally on the symbolism of smoke and fire; or to the experimental poetry and journalism of the Spanish Civil War veterans Roger Roughton and Tom Wintringham; or to Patrick Hamilton, better known for his Marxist diatribes against modernism in the 1930s. Hamilton's Hangover Square (1941), a novel about a community of characters in London facing the start of the war, is partly a commentary on modernism at midcentury. Some of its characters are thinly disguised modernists, paralyzed into inaction by introspection. Mellors also introduces the short stories of Anna Kavan, explaining that they commingle symbolic accounts of aerial warfare with visceral descriptions of being under bombardment. Finally, he introduces several reference books from the period: among them, R. S. R. Fitter's appendix on “bombsite flowers” in The Natural History of London (1945) and Macaulay's postwar guide, The Pleasure of Ruins (1953).
The book disappoints in only one respect: Mellors says little about current criticism to which his subject matter is very relevant. He does not, for instance, weigh in on the debate about the fate of modernism around 1940 (i.e., the constitution of “late modernism”), a matter debated by critics including Tyrus Miller, Jake Esty, Kristin Bluemel, and Marina Mackay. When we consider the rich array of modernist techniques he finds in Blitz literature, his reticence on this point is puzzling. Hamilton's stubborn antimodernism notwithstanding, most writers seem to have appreciated that the resources of conventional realism were inadequate for describing the aftermath of bombing. Another discussion Mellors neglects concerns modernist elegy (or, as it is more typically labeled, “anti-elegy”). The many instances of “haunting” (i.e., 144, 145, 160, 163) he detects in Blitz literature testify to the continuation of the “anti-elegiac,” or melancholic, spirit: to a feeling that even the justice of the war on Fascism was inadequate compensation for the losses it entailed. In this respect, Mellors's book complements Sara Wasson's fine recent work on the “urban gothic” in World War II literature, though again he fails to mention it.
The lack of any overarching critical purpose can make it sometimes difficult to understand why Mellors digresses at length into the details of a particular reading or of a particular author's biography. At times the book communicates the feeling of an encyclopedia, rather than that of an urgent critical argument. Nonetheless, it rewards careful reading from start to finish, for both the wealth of understudied material it introduces and the close readings that go with it. Properly digested, its contents will serve an important purpose indeed, refuting for once and for all any suggestion that modernism weakened and died around 1940.
