The love-charm of bombs

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ('Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?'), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' Graham Greene
When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded gruelling nights of sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a love-charm'. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and infidelities begun.
The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers- Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War and their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London and post-war Vienna and Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world.

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Library Journal Review

Feigel (English, Kings Coll.; Literature, Cinema, and Politics, 1930-1945) simultaneously pens a history of wartime London during the Blitz (1940-41) and biographical snapshot of Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, and Hilde Spiel, whose romantic and creative passions were ignited by the war. Willingly transformed into firefighters, ambulance drivers, and nurses, the authors through their romantic and sexual encounters recorded here show how pervasive the sentiment of exhilaration really was, though less commonly documented. Feigel suggests that World War II provided the welcome opportunity not only to write passionate characters but to become these characters in real life. VERDICT This meticulously researched biography (boasting 39 pages of notes and bibliography) reads as a historical narrative-action explodes from the page-with descriptions of firefighting using primitive equipment, snuffing out incendiary bombs wearing helmets, and desperate surgical procedures. By contrast, amorous meetings in dim bars, quiet but for the sound of the distant air raid sirens and muffled "choom" of another bomb silencing the love of a fellow Londoner are heard somewhere in the city. Recommended to fans of the featured writers, World War II history, and biography.-Benjamin Brudner, Curry Coll. Lib., Milton, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Despite its unending parade of declarative sentences, this is an affecting, critically perceptive contribution to history, literary history, and literature itself. Centering her story on Blitz-battered London between 1940 and 1945, Feigel (Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945), a specialist in British culture in the 1930s and '40s, vividly brings to life the tangled professional and amorous links between her five main characters, all of them writers-Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macauley, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (a.k.a. Henry Green), and Hilde Spiel-and the many others in their lives. More importantly, she sensitively illuminates their literary and other works by investigating the texts themselves for keys to their lives, thoughts, and loves-"art in the service of life," as well as "life in the service of art." For Feigel, her protagonists' London was not the city of propagandists' civic engagement but one of romantic and sexual exuberance never recovered in the inevitable post-war letdown. For most of them, "the war remained a charmed pocket of unrepeatable happiness." It's hard to imagine any reader of Feigel's book not wanting to read or revisit her main characters' novels and other writings. An absorbing, insightful work. Map and photos. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

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.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

With bombs falling across London between September 1940 and May 1941, five writers of various ages and backgrounds, selected by the sharp eye of Feigel (English and Medical Humanities/King's Coll., London; Literature, Cinema and Politics, 19301945, 2010, etc.), shifted into romantic overdrive. The imminent threat of destruction thrust the vulnerable inhabitants of this targeted city into a "suspended present" where "intense emotions could flourish," writes the author. The five writers (Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Yorke, aka Henry Green, Rose Macauley and Hilde Spiel) were decidedly literary, well-connected, mostly married and with solid humanitarian intentions that allowed them to aid in the Blitz crisis without actually going to war. Greene and Yorke hastily moved their wives and children to the countryside to pursue dalliances under fire; Greene, in Bloomsbury, and Elizabeth Bowen, in Marylebone, both worked as Air Raid Protection wardens at night. Yorke was a firefighter, and Macaulay, unmarried but involved for 20 years with her secret lover, Gerald O'Donovan, was an ambulance driver. While these four were directly involved in the action and writing their eyewitness accounts (later to be worked into their wartime novels and memoirs), the Austrian-born Jewish author Spiel was ensconced in a cramped flat in Wimbledon with her refugee parents, daughter and journalist husband, Peter de Mendelssohn, who worked at the Ministry of Information (as did Greene). While the others enjoyed a "good war," full of danger, sexual intrigue and heavy drinking, Spiel found her release after the war's end, when she returned to Vienna as a correspondent and recorded unbelievable devastation. These writers left an invaluable record of the war's toll, both physical and emotional, as researched doggedly by Feigel. A writerly work that entices readers to seek out the titles in question.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.