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Half a century later, Shirley wrote of this period: “Misery, foreboding, a life sentence … In this cruel time I wanted to die. Looking back, I wonder that I didn’t. The worst, beyond worst, of all was of course the lack of letters.” Again, there is some extravagance in the recollection. She had in fact received two letters from Alec that first month in Sydney, the first arriving only a week after she did. In the letters Alec is pragmatic and makes light of her trials: “As for the shorthand—it’s your own fault. However, if it gets you a job in the Australian Legation in London, it’s worth it.” Just as Shirley adopted a flip and ironic tone writing to Alan and Chris, so too Alec, while fond, was also laconic and humorous: “Dear Shirley, I got your letter yesterday and was, strangely enough, delighted. I need not tell you but will, as I know how young you are, that since you went away I have had moments of sadness that annoyed me very much. However I expect I shall be able to push this sort of weakness down into the less frequented byways of my soul.” While Shirley’s letters to him have not survived, it appears she had adopted a similar tone. Alec continued: “You make little of what must have been the most frightening few days in your life. Your poor mum must have been in a helluva state, particularly in Charlieville [sic].”
The disclosure shifted the discussion significantly, away from Shirley’s larger anxieties and her desire to hear the language of devotion toward Alec’s more pragmatic focus. He was concerned that his financial circumstances were not strong, writing in December that he felt “selfish and inconsiderate at having asked you to share so little,” and he suggested that it might be wiser for them to wait until he had had a chance to establish himself on a surer financial footing. He was also concerned that farming might not be Shirley’s ideal life:
If you are prepared, I am fairly confident that we shall make out, albeit probably never to the extent of attending cocktail parties regularly twice a week … We have a house to live in and even now I have gathered together more than the minimum in the way of furniture, linen and all the other oddses that a house has to have. The future prospects are that unless a major disaster occurs to me or the farm, I should be in a position to set up on my own in about six years’ time. The main snags are not that we shall starve but that the life of a farmer’s wife may strike you as being too dull and lacking in scope. This is a serious and vital aspect of the thing and you will have to judge for yourself when you arrive in this country. I am peculiar in that I like this sort of life and would have no other. You probably do not know whether you like it or not being guided for the moment by your whatsit. I could not blame you if having seen the set-up you told me to go to hell. That would be a pity as you are the only girl I have ever wanted to marry but don’t let that influence you too much.
:(
I have been trying to write to you times without number but have failed because you are too far away and because we have not seen each other for such a long time. I feel and have felt for a long time that I have made a mess of things in thinking I could shape this life into something that I could ask you to share with me. I realize that you will dismiss material considerations, but I also know that a minimum must be there for us to make a success of it. The minimum does not look like materializing for a long time to come. The enterprise is up to now a success but to get it that way meant unremitting hard work and will continue to mean that for another two years or possibly more. By this I mean that I get up at half past four and work till dark. I never go out for pleasure and am too tired to live and think as a human being. In addition to all this I find myself increasingly frustrated at the thought of doing nothing more, but just living. While I was laid up I was pressed down by the blackness of the prospect and of the horror of your disillusionment after you had seen for yourself. Don’t for God’s sake think I am saying all this to cover up anything else. There is nothing and nobody—it’s just that the life I had visualized is not coming out as planned and I see no light in the distance. Please forgive me for hurting you and remember it is I not you that have been found wanting. Alec.
:(
Chris Cooper had cautioned her about taking her professional self too seriously: “So the prospect of an Active Life opens before you? Don’t become a Career Woman, with black tailored suit and horn-rimmed glasses!” He suggested that her new interest in politics “might fill the gap caused by the absence of a sentimental side.” In fact Shirley’s sentimental side was not neglected for long; her time at the UN would be dominated not only by her ready engagement in its internal politics but also, and more intensely, with affairs of the heart. The most significant of these was a clandestine relationship lasting nearly three years with the director of Technical Assistance special fund operations, Arthur (known as Tex) Goldschmidt, but there were other flirtations, moody, unfulfilled. They troubled not so much her heart as her sense of social ease and confidence; sometimes friendly and pleasurable, often less than that. The men with whom she was involved through these years were significantly older, and most were married, which of course did not make for straightforward relations. More important, there was a sense across these experiences of an inclination for complication—of access, of security, of desire itself—that almost always precluded any chance of a happy conclusion. And this, even while she was inexperienced in the world of sex and matters of the heart to a degree that created no little anguish.
damn lol
Her work at the TAA was low-level and routine: recording minutes of meetings, typing, filing, all of it less than stimulating. She seems to have approached it with some disdain, and her efforts were rewarded with similar lack of approval and little advancement. For intellectual enrichment she turned to her new colleagues, her own extensive reading, and the cultural energy to be found everywhere in mid-century Manhattan. She later recalled her first summer in New York, going with friends from the office to see Geraldine Page’s legendary performance in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square Theatre in the Village; she was, she felt, “in New York at last … No air-conditioning then. The heat was inhuman, and suited the atmosphere of authenticity.” She went on buying books. As ever, she was consumed with poetry: always Auden, collections by Pound, Joyce, MacNeice, Robert Graves, Roy Campbell. And prose. Graham Greene was a perennial, but also Denton Welch’s coming-of-age novella In Youth Is Pleasure and, rapturously, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (“I am almost incoherent with admiration for her”). In the spring she took a short holiday alone to a resort in Bermuda. She lay in the sun and read Sade’s Justine and Balzac’s Cousin Pons, resisted advances from men, and made friends with two women from her hotel, a Mrs. Friedland and her mother, Mrs. Katzmann, both “so outspoken and intelligent and pleasant and we discussed civil liberties.”
<3
When Shirley was detailed to work with him through the early summer of 1953, at the end of the emotionally taxing year of her liaison with Howard, she was ready to fall in love again. Tex, as he would later disclose to her, had had affairs before, approaching them as something extraneous to his family life: “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife but I don’t make a practice of it and I don’t carry a load of guilt: it’s just as though I danced with someone.” This could not have been more different from Shirley’s approach to the affair, laden not just with her own sexual innocence but with an intensity and a vulnerability more in keeping with an even younger woman. She knew nothing about contraception, and Tex took responsibility for this. Their affair progressed through snatched hours here and there, at her apartment or his if the family was away, maintaining lighthearted and friendly relations at the office as a cover. The rushed nature of these encounters took their toll on Shirley. She was insecure, demanding of reassurance, and again her behaviour and insecurity provoked irritation and frustration in herself as well as her lover.
wild
Increasingly, she came into the life of Tex’s family, joining them for dinner, outings to the theatre or concerts, and on weekend visits to their country house in the Catskills, much as she had with the Daniels. Ann, then in her early teens, remembered Shirley as a rather prim young woman from the office whom her father thought promising and whom he had wanted to help. Arthur Junior, a little older, had a crush on Shirley, whom he thought beautiful, an older woman. Shirley took him to concerts and shared recorded music with him. He once tried to take her hand during a recital and she calmly withdrew hers, “as if she were an older sister.” Shirley never developed a friendship with Wicky, although she wrote in her diary that she tried to like her, as she had, more successfully, Judith Daniel. She remained resistant to the feminist principles that governed Wicky’s personal and professional life, preferring the more conventional hostilities prefigured by adultery. In mid-1955, writing in her diary about a telephone call from the Catskills house, ostensibly about a work matter, she noted that she could hear Wicky and the children in the background, and reflected that she was having, in Donne’s phrase, “correspondence while the foe stood by.” She immediately caught herself: “‘Foe’ is too much of a word; ‘foe’ would be a salve to my conscience. It is the trust I can’t bear, and the friendliness—and my treachery.” In early 1955, after an outing with the Goldschmidts, Shirley reflected that
Wicky seemed—perhaps it is my guilty imagination—a little short. When Tex asked if she wanted to go straight home she said, “unless you and Shirley want to elope.” He said to me “How would you like that?” “That would be wonderful, but do we take Wicky and [their third child] Jeannie along for ballast?” So it goes on and I loathe myself. Shakespeare had a few words to say about this sort of thing in the “Let Me Confess” sonnet:
“I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me.
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.”
omg
Inevitably, but not until the summer of 1956, Wicky learned of the affair. Tex phoned Shirley midweek and then went to Wicky in the Catskills, not returning until the following Sunday. The separation of the adulterous lovers Nettie and Clem in “A Place in the Country” echoes Shirley’s diary entry, at key points almost verbatim:
“Remember…” she began.
“What?”
“About my love.”
“Yes.”
“No one will ever love you so much.”
“No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes, it has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.
Then Nettie wonders, “What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail.” For the first days, Shirley was consumed first with “just terror and nausea and anxiety,” and then “the same, but for a sense of relief, in a strange way, that now there would be decision, finality, an end of concealment.” When Tex came to her apartment, at noon on the Sunday, “I knew it was all over.”
Certainly she was free, for the time being, of her family and, if not cured of, distracted from her broken heart. But even so, daily life was laced with anxiety. While she continued to attract admirers among the expat bureaucrats, she was not interested in romance. She wrote that she pursued, that year, “a collection of silly, pointless affaires,” including, it seems, a dalliance with the American journalist Harold H. Martin, who told her in a letter from early 1957, shortly after leaving Naples, of “memories that were burning more brightly than I could wish,” and wishing that he could “strike that perfect plateau of impersonality which you so happily reached in your first communication.” None of these “affaires” were sustaining or salutary. Shirley hoped “each time” to find “some final diversion of my affections”; however “being with such relentless people I too have learned to be hard, to be selfish.”
She was also despairing about her future. Her lack of national connection was not yet the imaginative boon it would become in later life, when she could pronounce that it was “a privilege to be at home in more than one place.” For now she was unsettled, the pragmatics of living in Italy looking as if they might prove too much for her despite the tangible life to which they gave access. Her insecurity was no doubt fed by her sense of her flimsy status at the UN:
Now it grows near the end of the year of my assignment, I know that I must try the FAO [the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN agency] in Rome, that my hopeless future—or lack of future—in NY cannot be re-accepted without an attempt elsewhere. Even loving Italy as I do, even so, I’m afraid: I’m afraid to live in a foreign non-Anglo-Saxon country always, to be cut off from my own background irrevocably and forever. But I have had so much need of solitary courage this past year that I believe I’m equal to anything, even to the more and more likely prospect of a barren, single life, working as a secretary or at most a clerk—well, I suppose that’s my fault and one should be glad to have had so much of the things that others covet.
<3
Leone worked in an intelligence office, and Elena found a position first as a cook at a British government-run kitchen, then as a translator and interpreter at the BBC, and later as an artist at Harrods. On the tenth anniversary of her brother’s death, while at the BBC, she broadcast a memorial honouring his poetic act of protest:
So in the secrecy of the soul’s solitude, when one becomes the master of one’s own life, and then gives it up, one must surely draw great joy. They must be happy to know that from the misery of everyday life they could attain such a poor moment of liberty. They must be sustained by the lightness of spirit, similar to that which gladdened the hearts of the saints. My brother must have died with this supreme lightness of spirit. And he was more fortunate than his companions, who were backstabbed by the murderous fascists.
Elena’s words here draw audibly on the futurist-tinged heroics of Lauro de Bosis’s writing, and like his, they also strike a distinctive tone of public responsibility and perhaps provided models for the forceful tone of Shirley’s writings about the United Nations.