As she wrote these letters Eileen was surely thinking of the portrayal of courtly love in her favourite book by C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, which she described as ‘the finest piece of Medieval literary criticism of our time & perhaps of all time’. She seems to see herself half ‘in the precarious dream-world of medieval love poetry’, as the faithful damsel of troubadour tradition in her chastity belt, creating a romance as she writes to her beloved lord away on the Crusades about the strange deeds at home in their feudal castle. She moves between ‘the allegory of the Body and the Heart’. And she follows C. S. Lewis in believing in the continuity of courtly love into the English literary tradition of Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Donne. She is a supreme writer of modern literary prose, schooled by her love of English literature from Malory to Elizabethan and modern literature, yet with all the wickedness of a Stella Gibbons in her delight in ‘mollocking’. Compared to these, Eileen seems scarcely aware of Jewish antecedents, such as the Song of Songs or the books of Ruth and Esther, let alone the Jewish and Arabic love poetry of medieval Spain, still to be discovered. Yet she has written a masterpiece worthy to stand with these earlier writings in the Jewish tradition, alongside Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962); and perhaps her insistence on the virtues of chastity and faithfulness, so at odds with her contemporaries, owes much to her Jewish upbringing.
The experience of love is both unique and universal, but it changes almost imperceptibly in each generation. Too often it is reflected in recollection, when, for whatever reason it is lost, its intensity dispersed or transformed by memory, as in Proust or the late poems of Thomas Hardy. There are many accounts of love from the two world wars, beginning with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Helen Thomas’s memoirs (1926 and 1931). Diana Athill – Eileen’s exact contemporary, who graduated from Oxford in the same year – may have experienced some of the same emotional highs and lows as Eileen as she corresponded with her fiancé, also in Egypt, but their relationship failed: he betrayed her (Instead of a Letter, 1963) and the letters themselves are lost. One of the nearest accounts in both time and place is Laurence Whistler’s numinous The Initials in the Heart (1964) about his love for the actress Jill Furse in the early years of the war, her death and his subsequent grieving for the rest of his life. But that too is about loss, and, like Athill’s account, is written twenty years after the event in an attempt to assuage his grief.
The one thing that such historical narratives lack, however personal they are, is ignorance of the future, and so they cannot capture the vividness of living in the present as this book does. This is what makes Eileen Alexander’s letters such an immense literary discovery. It is a description of love as it unfolds, ‘suspended between unborn tomorrow & dead yesterday’, as she wrote in the middle of war, an emotion as it is experienced by a young woman day by day, existing in a moment of history, unique to its time but universal in its meaning.
Historical Introduction by David Crane
On 19 July 1939, as Europe drifted towards war, a short report from the police courts under the mildly sardonic heading ‘DIFFERENT TYPE OF STUDENT HAD SIMILAR SORT OF ACCIDENT’ appeared in the inside pages of the Cambridge Daily News. ‘When a research student at Cambridge University,’ the piece began, ‘was summoned at the Maidenhead Borough Police Court on Monday for alleged dangerous driving and for failing to conform to a “Halt” sign at Braywick cross-roads on June 29th, he said to the magistrates, “I want to persuade you that I am not one of those reckless undergraduates about whom you have heard from time to time. I have already spent four years at Cambridge University, having gained a State Scholarship and two other scholarships and am now beginning my fifth year of study as a research student. During the four years I have been there, I have held various positions of responsibility in the life of the university, and have never come into contact with the Cambridge police or other authorities at all. I am not just a reckless undergraduate, but a research student of four years.”’
‘It was an accident that might happen to anyone,’ he told the court – the car roof was down, the sun was in his eyes, the road unfamiliar – but that was probably not a wise line to take. ‘It was alleged in evidence,’ the report went on, that he had driven over a major junction ‘at colossal speed’, smashed into a car coming from his right on the main Maidenhead to Windsor road, spinning his car over onto the far side of the road twenty-eight feet away and hurling his ‘lady passenger … herself a Cambridge student’ out of the passenger seat and onto the tarmac.
The ‘lady passenger … on her way to London to meet her parents who were coming home from Egypt the next day’ was Eileen Alexander, and the driver – banned from driving for a year, fined £3 and ordered to pay costs – was the Liverpool-born son of devoutly Jewish parents, with a double-first in classics and psychology, called Gershon Ellenbogen, the recipient of these letters. At the time the case came to court Eileen was in Maidenhead hospital, slowly and painfully recovering from her injuries, her nose and collarbone broken, her teeth and left eye-socket damaged, her face bruised and swollen.
If there was one event in her life, however, that Eileen would not have seen undone it was that car crash. She had first met Gershon Ellenbogen in the summer of 1938 but it was the accident that changed their lives, turning a friendship that might have naturally ended with their Cambridge days into the all-consuming love affair celebrated in these letters.
Eileen’s remarkably forgiving letter from her hospital bed, with which this volume opens, was just the first trickle in an unstoppable flood of words that passed between them over the long years of war. At some stage Gershon’s letters to her were either lost or destroyed, but he preserved hers to the end of his life, more than a thousand of them in all, written from air-raid shelters and office desks, on buses and station platforms, in hotel foyers and under hair-dryers, in that minuscule hand of hers that could have damaged stronger eyesights than Gershon’s.
Like the lovers in a poem of Donne’s – a God in her pantheon second only to Shakespeare – Eileen lived through Gershon, happy only when she was writing to him or when a letter from him arrived to obliterate the space between them. In many ways the letters are closer to a diary than love letters, and closer still to an uninhibited and unstoppable stream of consciousness than either – a ‘complete chronicle’ of her life, waking and sleeping, as she put it – with that ‘little room’ of Donne’s lovers that she inhabited, peopled with a wonderful array of characters and incident.
Even were these letters less brilliantly written they would still be of historical interest for the people Eileen knew, from wartime cabinet ministers, financiers, soldiers, philanthropists and art collectors to some of the major figures in the Zionist movement and the future State of Israel. She was lucky to have been part of a very bright Cambridge set, and yet it is just as much the London beyond her friends and family, the London of chance meetings in cinema queues and Lyons Corner Houses, of overheard snatches of conversations in restaurants and shelters – the London of the Blitz – that gives her letters their life and their colour.
These letters – vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns – can speak for themselves, but something needs to be said of the remarkable woman who wrote them.
Eileen Helen Alexander was born in Cairo on 13 April 1917, the oldest of three children of Vicky Mosseri and Alec Alexander, a much-loved and highly successful South African-born and Cambridge-educated Cairo barrister of impoverished Polish Jewish parents. While it was from her father that Eileen inherited her intellectual