The Captive Reader

Can you ever have too many diaries from the Second World War?  I think not and this week I’m out to prove it.  I have four reviews coming up over the next week, all of diaries written by women during WWII.  Two of them chronicle what was going on in England (Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham and These Wonderful Rumours! by May Smith) while the other two look at what was happening in Germany (On the Other Side byMathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg and The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg).  Today I’ll be starting with the weakest of the four: Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham.

Now, the delightful Jenny of Reading the End is the best PR person I think this book has probably had since its original publication in 1985.  I’m certainly not going to be.  She read it back in 2009 and since I started blogging in early 2010 I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen her recommend it to others, including myself.  And, in many ways, I can understand why she loves it: Wyndham’s frank diaries feel very much like those of a normal, self-absorbed sixteen or seventeen year old, obsessed with relationships and sex and not much carrying about the greater implications of the major world events playing out around her.  But the shallowness of Wyndham and her social circle, the artificiality of their lives, the callous way they managed their relationships drove me completely around the bend.

Wyndham was sixteen when the war began, the only daughter of highly dramatic and thankfully divorced parents.  Wyndham lived with her mother – a devout Catholic after her conversion when Joan was small – and her mother’s companion in west London.  One gathers that her father was off being generally useless most of the time.  At sixteen, Wyndham has some vague idea of studying art but mostly she is very busy have passionate crushes on pretty much everyone she comes into contact with.  Fair enough.

Where things took, for me, a calamitous turn was when Wyndham started moving in more artistic circles.  When she begins to study art, her mother sets her up with a small studio of her own.  Wyndham still lives at home, technically (she is only seventeen), but the bulk of her time is spent in her studio, generally surrounded by useless older men who talk about how much they want to seduce her but then do nothing about it, being scared off by her virginity.

My tolerance for artistic circles is low at the best of times but the so-called artists that Wyndham finds herself keeping company with are the absolute worst.  They seem to spend all their time posing as artists rather than producing any art.  For Wyndham certainly, art lessons and her studio are whims her mother is indulging her in.  She notes several times that she is not really an artist and doesn’t take what she is doing seriously.  Neither apparently do her new thirty-something friends.  I suppose if you’re bone lazy it is easier to go around seducing teenagers and mooching all of their paint and food.  I will say that these studio seduction scenes perfectly match the clichéd vision of what bohemian “artists” get up to and there is always some value in remembering that clichés are founded in truth.  Still, it is a world away from the commercially-minded art students and studio days described by E.H. Shepard in Drawn from Life.  But there again you have the difference between people who play at being artists and those who actually work at it.  I suspect Wyndham and her set would have had nothing but contempt for the middle-class Shepard and his work ethic.

Still, shiftlessness and a little immorality among friends can all be excused.  The whole world would be very boring if it were peopled only by monogamous, responsible capitalists (I am picturing a world composed entirely of the Swiss which sounds delightfully efficient, if dull).  What pushed me over the edge was the universally awful natures of the people Wyndham chose to surround herself with.  I can understand why all the unrepentant adulterers and camp homosexuals would have seemed exotic to a girl just out of school but I cannot understand why she willingly put up with their pettiness, their cruelty, and their self-absorption.  Not a single one of them seems to have any real kindness or compassion in them and the worst of the bunch is the man that Wyndham falls in love with and loses (or rather cheerfully unloads) her virginity to: Rupert.  Rupert is vile.  Whenever he appeared and Wyndham went weak kneed, I felt ill.  When Wyndham says:

Rupert and I sat on his roof in the sun.  It was perfect – he was wearing a blue and white striped shirt and sackcloth trousers and playing Spanish music on his guitar, with one bare foot resting on a brick. (Sunday, 3^rd August)

All I could think was how little I could possibly have in common with a woman who defines perfection as a man wearing sackcloth trousers and, worse, a blue and white striped shirt.  Still, that is by far the least of Rupert’s sins.  He talks down to Wyndham, continues sleeping with other women while he’s seeing and sleeping with her, is unspeakably awful when one of their friends – and one of Joan’s old admirers – is killed during the war, and hits her.  Wyndham makes very little protest about any of this treatment or, if she does, she doesn’t mean it.  Even after receiving a heavy blow in public, she notes that “the extraordinary thing is, I bore him no malice although I pretended to.”  The “pretending to” might be what pushed me completely over the edge with this book.  So much of Wyndham’s life feels artificial but acting on top of that, pretending at things, just adds a whole new level of good riddance as far as I’m concerned.  I almost wished Joan and her friends were fictional characters, so my hatred of them and desire to see them bombed to smithereens in all their smugness would seem a little less callous.  Eventually, Rupert is called up (yay!) and then Wyndham joins the WAAFs.  I can’t say I wasn’t pleased to see everyone finally usefully employed and forced to confront the real world – and the war, which until then had only been a minor inconvenience, what with the Blitz and all – for once.

The writing throughout is good, though I suspect the diaries were heavily edited/rewritten for publication.  There is too much dialogue to seem natural in a diary format and every so often the older author obviously inserts herself to provide hindsight commentary (such as “this was the night that such-and-such famous event occurred”. Why this wasn’t done in a footnote I have no idea).  Frustratingly, the entries aren’t properly dated – they have the day of the week and the day of the month but generally not the month itself or the year.  This got rather disorienting.  But, as should be obvious by now, my issue really wasn’t with the writing but with the writer.  It is hard to feel fascinated by someone who you think is living a shallow and artificial life, more concerned with appearances and posturing than substance.