I have now read a good number of Rose Macaulay’s novels – she was a very interesting and prolific writer whose career spanned something like fifty years. Non-Combatants and Others is one of her earlier works re-issued last year by Handheld Press who have reissued two of her other earlier novels – which I highly recommend. This volume consists of the novel Non Combatants and Others – first published in 1916 – some pieces of journalism, some essays, and a short story. Together these pieces make up an excellent collection of writings against war – Rose Macaulay was a committed pacifist in the years before the second world war.
The novel is remarkable for being the first anti-war novel to have been published during The First World War. Considering how jingoistic the country was at this time, it seems extraordinary that she should have published it at all during the war – it seems at the very least quite a brave step.
The novel Non Combatants and Others is the longest piece in this volume at a little more than two-hundred pages. The non-combatants of the title being those who do not go off to war, the women, the conscientious objectors, and those whose health precludes them from joining the fray. Alix Sandomir is the main focus of the novel – a young woman studying art, as the novel opens it is 1915 and Alix is living with her aunt and cousins in the country. Alix’s father is dead, a Polish liberationist who died in a Russian prison, her mother Daphne is a campaigner for peace, she travels widely and is currently abroad again. A childhood illness has left Alix with a limp – she walks with a stick and is very conscious of her disability. Her aunts and cousins are busy with various kinds of war work – all of which has left Alix feeling rather out of things, she is unable to fully engage with what is happening all around her and the changes that war has brought with it.
“For among them, the centre of the family, was John; John wounded and just out of hospital and home on a month’s sick-leave; John with a red scar from his square jaw to his square forehead, stammering as he talked because the nerves of his tongue had been damaged. Alix, watching from the garden, saw the queer way his throat worked, struggling with some word.”
Alix decides to move in with a distant cousin she barely knows in London. Her cousin is a middle aged woman with two grown up daughters, their house -Violette – is closer to her art school – but it is also away from all the talk of war and war work. At Violette there is little if any talk of war. Her cousin Mrs Frampton is a comfortable, conventional woman, her daughters each have their own concerns. Kate is very prim her life seems to revolve largely around her church – she has little time for any enjoyment. Evie is very beautiful and she is all about enjoying herself – she has lots of friends, and lots of admirers and will be the unwitting and unthinking cause of Alix’s heartbreak.
From Violette Alix is able to carry on the life she wants to live. She attends her art school – she visits her brother Nicolas in the rooms he shares with his friend Rev West – and when her friend Basil is sent home from the war injured she is able to visit him too.
“He talked nonsense, absurdly; they all did. They all laughed, but Basil laughed most; he laughed too much. He said it was a horrible bore out there; funny, of course, in parts, but for the most part irredeemably tedious. And no reason to think it would ever end, except by both sides just getting too tired to go on…Idiotic business, chucking bombs over into trenches full of chaps you had no grudge against and who wished you no ill …and they chucking bombs at you, much more idiotic still. The whole thing hopelessly silly…”
There are some days out to be enjoyed with friends, but everywhere there are reminders of the war, as the year goes on, Alix is forced to face some of what is happening across the channel. Tragedy is brought right to her door – and the experiences of those around her can’t be entirely ignored. To this point Alix has been quite selfish – concerning herself only with what she wants to be concerned with – keeping everything else at bay. This cannot be sustained.
Cleverly Rose Macaulay shows us the various points of view of all these characters – revealing how the war impacted on different people in different ways and how that manifested itself – with some people hiding quite well how they really were.
Alix’s mother Daphne arrives in London in time to help Alix re-evaluate the way she is living.
Following on from this excellent novel – are the non-fiction pieces written between 1936 and 1945 for Time and Tide, The Spectator and The Listener. These pieces are really well written – together they detail the rise of fascism abroad and in the UK and the response to war of ordinary people.
“Where an hour back two houses stood in this small street, there is a jumbled mountain of fallen masonry, rubble, the shattered debris of two crashed homes; beneath it lie jammed those who lived there; some of them call out, crying for rescue, others are dumb. Through the pits and craters in the rubbled mass the smell of gas seeps.”
(5 October 1940)
One piece I found fascinating and chilling was her report on a visit (in her role as a journalist) to one of Mosely’s rallies. Other pieces discuss such things as the differing attitudes to the death and destruction of war, pacifism, and post-war morality.
The final piece in the book is Miss Anstruther’s Letters – a wonderful short story from 1942 – which I have read twice before. It is beautifully rendered, memorable because of its simple poignancy and the fact it is based on an incident in Rose Macaulay’s own life.
Together this novel and the non-fiction pieces that follow it provide an extraordinary sense of the pain and anger that so many felt towards the suffering that war brought with it.
Handheld are doing an excellent job of reissuing Rose Macaulay’s work, aren’t they. She was clearly an impassioned commentator as well as a talented novelist.
They certainly are! She was an impassioned commentator, you get a sense of that through her fiction too.
Ah, Miss Anstruther’s Letters! What a heartbreaking story – and, as you say, very memorable. (That image of Miss A scrabbling around in the rubble has lodged itself in my brain.) For some reason, I thought this book was a collection of non-fiction pieces, but that’s clearly not the case. It’s interesting to see these fictional pieces alongside the essays, in a similar way to the Inez Holden’s Blitz Writing, perhaps? Different war, obviously, but a similar principle, I guess…
Yes that story really is fabulous.
This collection is similar to the Inez Holden but as you say mainly focusing on an earlier war. The novel is by far the longest piece which for someone like me who sometimes struggles with nonfiction was perfect.
Excellent blog.
Thank you.
Lovely post Ali, and I so agree about this one. The novel on its own is powerful enough, but the journalism is excellent too and Miss Anstruther – well, I ended up quite emotionally draiend after reading the book. Such a good book!
Thank you, yes all the pieces work so well together because they present such a brilliant picture of war and its effects. I felt quite drained too, I think why I chose a Mrs Tim book to read afterwards.
Coming across a description of this novel in a history book, I was also struck that a book with its anti-war sentiments was published when it was. As you say, a brave step. This volume looks like a particularly lovely one with its selection of pieces.
It really is a lovely volume, and all these pieces work together so well.
I enjoyed this too but unfortunately my edition of the book didn’t include the extra non-fiction pieces or Miss Anstruther’s Letters – it sounds as though I’ve missed out!
Oh that is a shame, I do think this edition is particularly good because of those additional texts.
Sounds wonderful! I’ve owned this for SO many years and still haven’t read – must get a move on.
Oh yes do, it’s fascinating in so many ways.
That was a brave novel to write at that time, wasn’t it? Miss Anstruther is in the 2nd Persephone Book of Short Stories, isn’t she – I found it almost unbearably poignant and the fact it’s based on a true event even more so.
A very brave novel for the times. Miss Anstruther is very poignant, a wonderful story.
Surely this has been mentioned before, and I’ve simply forgotten, but I did not realize that she was a committed pacifist. That makes me think of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby.
Yes, I don’t know much about Rose Macaulay’s life but I have wondered whether she ever knew Holtby and Brittain, they would have had much in common I think.