The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War
It wasn’t just in movies that London during the blitz bred romance. It happened in real life, too, as Feigel makes clear in this fascinating group biography of five English writers who spent the blitz years fighting fires, driving ambulances, serving as air wardens, and, above all, making love, usually in illicit relationships. From late 1940 into 1941, when the bombs were at their most terrifying, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Henry Green, and Hilde Spiel risked their lives in relief work while engaging in life-defining love affairs. Clocks tended to stop when bombs exploded nearby, Feigel notes, “and the suspended present created a climate where intense emotions could flourish.” Or, as a character in Henry Green’s Caught puts it, “War . . . was sex.” Of course, it was more than that, and if, at times, these writers’ obsessive focus on their erotic lives seems a little myopic, that’s the point: how the intensity of life during the blitz translated inevitably into a craving for human connectedness. Though the latter portions of the book, which follow the writers’ postwar lives, seem anticlimactic, this is a compelling study of an endlessly fascinating moment in world history. --Bill Ott