Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (review)

Imagining our own extinction has been a particularly modern preoccupation. It reached a peak of intensity in the years between 1914 and 1945, after the invention of aerial bombardment had brought civilians, women, and children into the same category as soldiers: anyone and everyone was liable to be gassed, bombed, burned, or infected with germs if, or when, the bomber got through. Fantasies on the model of H. G. Wells’s 1908 novel The War in the Air proliferated after the bombs dropped by Zeppelins and Gothas in the First World War destroyed buildings and killed or wounded workers, the elderly, and schoolchildren alike. A new sense of vulnerability and a new fear of mass destruction inflects much of the art, literature, popular fiction, and film of the interwar years, exacerbated by the signs of an approaching return of war. This created a climate in which both surrealism and movements for social change were able to flourish without either, in Britain at least, triumphing over the other. And when war did break out, the incomplete articulations of surrealism and the quizzical pragmatism of British social investigation came together in a curious cultural efflorescence. It is this, and the multiple manifestations of the elemental in the everyday and the everyday in the elemental, which provides the material of Leo Mellor’s fascinating guide to writing and reading the ruins of wartime London.

The book examines the horror of bombing, the fragmentation that results from it, the power of fire, and the dreams and hauntings they all release, through poetry, fiction, painting, photography, and film. By means of an introductory chapter, which takes in the first war, fantasy fiction, and Spain (a nice reading of George Barker’s Elegy on Spain), Mellor shows how a new sense of the city as the target for bombs, and therefore potential bombsite, leads to a new sense of the linguistic porosity of cities and bodies, and how the imagination of cataclysmic destruction entails a new way of thinking about the relation of man and nature—a new ecology. The sense of foreboding that characterized what Mellor calls “the long 1939,” the period from Munich and the summer of 1938, the end of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, to the end of the phony war in April 1940, is anatomized through imaginative and persuasive readings of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and Henry Green’s Party Going (among others). At this point, as Mellor puts it, “The arc from the imagined bombsites of the 1890s now arrives in the actuality of Londoners’ lives” (46).

“Fire is so familiar, fire is everywhere to be seen. Fire needs no definition. . . . The difficulty lies rather in the translation of fire into the imagination through such normally expedient channels as the canvas and the written word” (47). William Sansom’s words, which preface the second chapter of the book, lead on to a powerful engagement with Sansom’s own fire-writing, from his Fireman Flower and elsewhere, and with Spender and MacNeice, Henry Green, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. Bodies, allegory, time and temporalities, elegy, and solace: all these are worked into a framework which enables Mellor to argue for a reworking of modernist tropes and techniques to encompass the new conditions, “to show how and why an elemental force—fire—might be relevant to an understanding of how modernism equipped and allowed recursive narrative forms to deal with the city at war” as the material city itself was being transformed.

The uncanniness of fire so decisively removed from its customary role in the hearth points up the surreality that so frequently broke through the surface of what passed for normality during the Blitz and its aftermath. As so many of London’s buildings stood or lay in partial or complete destruction, new vistas appeared every morning, new incongruities, new juxtapositions. Mellor is very good on fragments and the way in which the material fragmentation of the city creates a new poetic, a metonymics...