British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime by Beryl Pong

Author:Beryl Pong [Pong, Beryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

‘We must return to having children. If we are to have a future as noble as our past’

A decade before writing Cloudless May, in her autobiographical work No Time Like the Present (1933) Jameson expressed anger at the First World War and discouraged her son from engaging in any future conflict: ‘I shall tell him … that war is not worth its cost, nor is victory worth the cost’ (238). By the Second World War, while no less a pacifist and no less opposed to war, Jameson felt that something had to be done to end the occupation of a country she held dear. But her treatment of children, and of war’s impacts on children in particular, remain one of the most ambivalent aspects of the novel. For Rienne as for others, the propensity for mythologizing France’s temporal resilience and eternality—‘On the Loire or on the Garonne or on the Dordogne or on the Lot, they would defend the Seine, they would defend a memory and the future’—hinges on the idea of protecting children as the means for national posterity (471). As the fascist collaborator Thiviers declares: ‘We must return to having children. If we are to have a future as noble as our past’ (258). Children are repeatedly invoked with ideological intentions by all sides in the debate over the national future. Even Marguerite’s private wish to escape poverty and the war is couched in her desire to bear a son with Bergeot; she uses the promise of pregnancy as a shorthand for the possibilities of a post-armistice future.

The intersection of roots and futurity with that of children would find its most negative and egregious foil in Labenne, who, obsessed with heritage and lineage, wants his children, and his children’s children, to carry on the legacy of fascism through the generations. His concern for his offspring is linked less to their well-being than to their role in guaranteeing his posterity: ‘His son was more than a fine boy. Henry was his stock, his roots in the ground of a province, his future. The future of France, the safety of France, was the same thing as Henry’s safety, the safety of the virile Labenne stock’ (248). Later again, ‘[H]e talked about the future of France as if France equalled Labenne. He bragged about his great grand-children’ (407). As he imagines their future marriages, professions, and political influences—‘of the two sons the younger might go into the Church—why not?—the Church is still a power … . Labenne father of Cardinal Labenne’—the children are not children at all, but merely conduits for his political machinations and legacy (338). Labenne also ties them intimately to the French landscape, especially to his house in Thouédun, which suggests some uneasy affinities with Bergeot’s and Émile’s idealizing of place in their respective understandings of national time.

The only moment in which the novel explicitly undercuts the ideological abstraction of children is in the scene of the exodus, as Katherine Cooper points out (‘His Dearest’). During those few weeks,

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