fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies, critical studies and essays on the subject of the Bloomsbury Group alone. Then there’s the work they wrote and painted themselves – some of it lastingly important, like the best novels of Virginia Woolf, or little more than decorative, as is the case with the art of Duncan Grant. The Blitz has been written about by Angus Calder in his magisterial The People’s War, while the literary aspects of life in London during the German invasion have been accounted for recently in Lara Feigel’s highly original The Love-charm of Bombs. And D J Taylor’s Lost Girls tells the stories of the young women who did the typing and made the tea – among other, more emotionally draining, activities – in the Bedford Square offices of the magazine Horizon, edited by the mercurial Cyril Connolly. Connolly is just one of the familiar (some might say over-familiar) figures of the 1940s who come under Loxley’s inspection in Writing in the Dark. He is, as always, a welcome presence, with his helter-skelter love life and gluttonous appetite for French cuisine. How was he able to feast on truffles and lobster at a time when even the rich were making do with powdered milk and eggs and, if fortunate, tinned sardines? He somehow managed to, courtesy of an obliging restaurateur. Good food and wine could always be relied on to stave off the fits of melancholy that seized him regularly, if only for a few happy hours. Loxley offers as an example of Connolly’s gloomy disposition the observation that English public schoolboys, like Connolly himself, were ‘created sick, commanded to be sound’. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the extremely well-read editor, bookreviewer and pseudonymous author of The Unquiet Grave was quoting from Chorus Sacerdotum by the great Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville. Writing in the Dark opens in January 1939 with W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood departing for America, where they were to spend the greater part of their lives. In a hastily organised parliamentary debate regarding the behaviour of the ‘traitors’, the poet’s name was changed to that of H W (‘Bunny’) Austin, the famous tennis player, as Loxley gleefully recounts. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that both men knew more about the nature of the fascist beast that was threatening Europe than their friends and detractors. Isherwood, in particular, had witnessed Jews being rounded up and taken in for questioning on a daily
basis in Berlin. He’d seen the rallies, too, in which the smirking Chancellor lauded the superiority of the Aryan race to roars of approval from the ecstatic crowds. The apt word to describe Loxley’s method is ‘panoramic’. He tries to give an overview of the different ways in which writers and intellectuals reacted to the extraordinary events that were taking place in and out of their midst. Most of the substantial players in this surreal charade are here – the essentially optimistic Stephen Spender, still enamoured of the Soviet Union, while his personal life became more complicated; Leonard and Virginia Woolf, of course. Then there’s John Lehmann, with his troubles at the Hogarth Press, attempting to persuade Leonard to publish young and politically engaged poets instead of the likes of Joan Easdale, who was once ludicrously compared to Emily Dickinson. And the dandyish Julian Maclaren-Ross, author of several fine wartime stories, whose work appeared in both Horizon and Lehmann’s New Writing. The booze-ridden Dylan Thomas played the role of the dissolute and doomed poet, complete with booming voice, until his predictably ugly death. Yet it’s those on the periphery – those waiting in the wings, as it were – who deserve more attention. Henry Green’s novel Caught captures the eeriness of everyday existence during the Blitz better than any other work of fiction of the period. He is treated respectfully, as is Arthur Koestler, recently arrived from Paris, where his masterpiece Darkness at Noon was completed. Others, like Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, were to write about the war with the advantage of hindsight, in the 1950s and 1960s. The novelist X Trapnel, who features in the later volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, is based on the unlucky Maclaren-Ross, whose bohemian life came to a distressing close in 1964. But the star of Writing in the Dark is
‘You trained him to fetch your slippers. I trained him to fetch your credit cards’
undoubtedly George Orwell, who toiled over the seminal Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – which presaged what would happen when Stalin, for so long a hero of the Left, tightened his grip on Eastern Europe. Orwell’s plain style, that of an ever-wary sceptic, remains pertinent as nationalism is asserting itself again in too many parts of the world. Will Loxley reminds us of Orwell’s hard-earned authority in this otherwise uneven survey of already well-charted literary territory.
Waspish history RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse By Dave Goulson Jonathan Cape £20 One evening in 1899, Thomas Hardy was working by the light of his desk lamp. A longlegs, a moth, a bumblebee and a fly were drawn to his desk by the bright beams. My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall supine. ‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I. That’s what Dave Goulson thinks, too. Bumblebees are his specialty. The most endearing of insects, he calls them: smart at navigation and memory, and socially complex. But then Goulson finds beauty, mystery and wonder throughout the insect world. His mission is to persuade humans to respect insect life, even if they can’t love insects. One million species have so far been identified. He estimates that another four million species are yet to be discovered. Although insects are indispensable to the planet’s ecosystem, little is known of their biology, distribution and abundance. What is clear, however, is that unsustainable exploitation of Earth’s finite resources has led to a frightening collapse of insect density and species richness. Earth is speeding towards a new geological era of destructive change. Central to this is the decimation of the insect population as a result of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, light pollution and perhaps other, as yet unidentified, human-made agents. As one example, the geographical area of Britain in which the great yellow bumblebee can be found has decreased by 95 per cent. Reliable The Oldie August 2021 49
