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  Another tie in London was with St. Edward’s House, Westminster, the Cowley Fathers’ London headquarters, where Father Lucius Gary was her confessor, or in his absence Father Hamilton Johnson. In a letter to the writer of this Introduction dated 6th August 1959 Father Johnson has described his memories of his ministry to Rose as follows:

  When I went, just before the first war, to St. Edward’s House … Father Cary, who only occasionally came to London from Oxford, told me that he had told a few of his penitents to come to me when they could not easily get at him. Among these was Rose. She was living in Cambridge, and wrote notes to me from there at intervals to make appointments for her Confessions when she was coming to London from Cambridge; nothing else at all in her letters. This she did about half a dozen times, from the summer of 1914 until the autumn of 1916. Once (I think in Aug? 16) I found her (to my surprise) in a little Retreat for Women (or perhaps Ladies)—in some little Sisters’ house, somewhere in the suburbs—I quite forget where—which I had been sent to conduct. I think she came to make her Confession at a time when others were doing so, and then asked me if she could come again to talk a little. This she did. We sat upright on chairs facing one another, both of us stiff and shy—much more stiff and shy than in the addresses in the little chapel, talking, I think, of nothing save only of how a young lady living with her family might most suitably conduct herself. That, I think, was my one and only viva voce conversation with Rose, (she sitting, and not kneeling) … Oh yes, and I remember looking out from the little parlour where I was put, into the little, dull, square garden, and seeing Miss Macaulay pacing up and down very gravely and slowly, I think on the grass, for a long while, in steadily drizzling rain, tall and grave and thoughtful, wearing some sort of dark tweed suit—no overcoat or rain-coat. This she did for a long time.

  A few months after this, in November 1916, Father Johnson left for the United States, to join the Cowley Fathers’ community at Boston, and his departure coincided with the beginning of a new stage in Rose’s life. During the first years of the war she had tried various kinds of war work near Cambridge, first as a V.A.D. and then as a land-girl, but she was not well suited to either job. Meanwhile in 1915 George Macaulay had died and her mother afterwards moved to Beaconsfield. At this point Rose took a job at the War Office, and thenceforward London became her home and the literary set her natural milieu.

  Before the war ended there came another important turning point for her. Until this time, though she already prized her independence in London, her family and the family home had been the axis of her life. Her affections, her writings, her travels, her hobbies, were all primarily related to home and family, though once, just before the war, she had almost become engaged. By 1917 she had written eight novels, all more or less autobiographical and all—along with the “brilliant cleverness”— somewhat introspective and sad; there had also been a book of poems, The Two Blind Countries, which showed a searching thoughtfulness and melancholy. Underlying many of her writings was the theme of family relationships, especially of brother and sister, and there was a sexless quality about many of the leading characters in her novels which she underlined by giving them Christian names appropriate to either a man or a woman, a habit that later reasserted itself. But in wartime London Rose fell in love with a man who, she later learnt, was already married. For some years she struggled to combine their friendship with her now habitual religious practice. In the early twenties however their secret attachment deepened and eventually she broke away from the sacramental life of the Church. For nearly twenty years, until his death during the second world war, he was the dominant personal influence in her life. They met frequently in London and also abroad and her attachment became well known to her sisters and to her mother (who died in 1925) but was seldom discussed. Among her intimate friends in London the companionship was tacitly accepted, but outside Rose’s immediate circle nothing was known of it.

  The new pattern of Rose’s life during the ′20s when she took to living in a flat in Marylebone and also travelled much —sometimes with friends, sometimes with members of the family—was reflected in the change that came about in her writings. In 1919 her second book of poems, Three Days, was published, but subsequently there was no more poetry. Instead came a spate of witty, high-brow novels: Potterism, Dangerous Ages, Mystery at Geneva, Told by an Idiot, Orphan Island, Crewe Train, Keeping up Appearances, and Staying with Relations. There were also innumerable articles and reviews and she became famous for her flippant wit and sparkling satire as well as for her wide erudition. She often made mock of religion, especially of its incongruities and excesses, which won for her the reputation of an agnostic; nevertheless all through the time of her estrangement from the Church her instinctive leaning towards the religious continued to assert itself. Her ever widening circle of intellectual friends such as Gilbert Murray, E.M. Forster, and the Harold Nicolsons, for many of whom she had a warm admiration and affection, included few practising Christians, and to all appearances, during the inter-war years her life had hardly a point of contact with the Church. But Rose, with her talent for the paradoxical, had friends among the clergy even at this time. Occasionally too she attended church services, and much enjoyed listening to good preachers.

  In 1931, Rose’s fiftieth year, her book Some Religious Elements in English Literature was published. It is a brief work written in a vein of academic detachment, in which she set out to illustrate her theory that religious literature is usually the outcome of some kind of clash or conflict. They Were Defeated, her only historical novel, was published in the following year and together these two books marked the beginning of a new, more serious stage in her writing, with fewer novels and more essays and works on historical subjects and travel.

  The second world war was a time of great personal stress for Rose. In 1941 her sister Margaret died which left Rose and Jean as the only surviving members of the family in England (Will had settled in Canada but never married; he died there in 1945). Jean’s work as a District Nurse had recently brought her to Romford in Essex, so the two sisters were able to meet often and they became very intimate friends. Then soon after Margaret’s death Rose’s flat in Luxborough House, Marylebone, was bombed. Almost all her belongings were destroyed, including all her library and some unpublished manuscripts. Her many friends rallied round with gifts of books towards a new library but the shock of the loss had been desolating. At this time an additional distress for Rose was the fatal illness of the man she loved.

  After his death she herself was seriously ill; in spite of the demands she always made on herself she was not at all physically strong. But before the end of the war she was hard at work again, busy with the research for her book They Went to Portugal. She did not write any fiction during the war but in 1950 came The World my Wilderness with its theme of loneliness and despair. In that same year Rose received the unexpected letter from Father Johnson which set off the correspondence that was to guide her gradually back into the Church and to lead to the inner transformation of her life.

  When the correspondence began, and indeed for the first eighteen months of it, neither Rose nor Father Johnson had any idea they were related. But by chance Rose mentioned that her name had been chosen because her mother’s mother had been one of the Rose family. It then came to light that through the Roses she and Father Johnson were fourth cousins—they had the same great-great-great-grandparents, Dorothy Vaughan and Joseph Foster Barham. This was a delight to Rose who was enormously interested in family relationships, but even more so to Father Johnson, to whom cousinship represented a very important family bond: in his own family a vast network of cousins was intricately complicated by intermarriage.

  Father Johnson like Rose herself had innumerable clerical ancestors; he himself was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Norfolk parsons. His great-grandfather, John Johnson (“Johnny of Norfolk”), was a cousin and close friend of William Cowper, the poet, for whom he cared devotedly throughout his last illness. In t
emperament the Johnsons tended to be sensitive and diffident, but possessed of unusual insight and understanding.

  John Hamilton Cowper Johnson was born in 1877 and was the eldest of six brothers. His father found the expense of educating this family of sons a considerable burden and when Hamilton was seventeen a post was procured for him with the Eastern Telegraph Company. He worked for five years in Malta but then came to the conclusion that this was not his vocation and decided to take holy orders. After studying at home to qualify for entrance he went up to New College, Oxford, where he was a little older than the average undergraduate, and while at Oxford he came under the influence of the Cowley Fathers. He then trained at Cuddesdon and had two years in a curacy before joining the Cowley Fathers in 1906. Until 1914 he was at Cowley; he then spent just over two years at St. Edward’s House, Westminster and in 1916 was transferred to the American branch of the Society. For the rest of his life (until his death in March 1961)—nearly forty-five years—he remained in America, beloved and respected by all who knew him. For many years he lived and worked at the S.S.J.E. Mission House in Bowdoin Street, Boston and later at the Monastery in Memorial Drive, Cambridge. During this time his outstanding gifts as spiritual director and confessor became well recognized and were given full scope.

  His talent as a prolific letter-writer was very exceptional, and his letters, which were not confined to spiritual guidance, convey vividly his own vitality and sense of humour, also the joy he took in every detail connected with his correspondent. Until a few years before his death, when his health became increasingly precarious, he liked to keep in touch by letter with many of his numerous cousins, for example with John Cowper Powys (whose mother was his aunt). His relations with his Powys cousins were always warmly affectionate though there were sometimes “pitched dialectical battles” on the subject of Christianity. John Cowper Powys in his Autobiography has mentioned the intense pleasure it gave him to visit his cousin Hamilton in America, and also alluded to Hamilton’s “astonishing knowledge of Latin.”

  Father Johnson’s strong sense of family and his pleasure in reinforcing family bonds led him, when he discovered the cousinship with Rose, to introduce her by letter to one of his cousins in England, Mary Barham Johnson. The following extract is quoted from a letter he wrote to his cousin Mary on 24th February, 1952:

  On Saturday I had a letter from our fourth cousin … I do so hope that you will meet her and make friends with her one day. I have not seen her for 36 years, and then only in a professional sort of way. In the summer of 1950, I wrote to her to tell her how much I had been interested by her historical novel They Were Defeated—now quite old. She welcomed my letter, and after a month, or 2 or 3 months, I was able to give her a little push back to where she belonged, inside the church door, instead of standing in the porch; and she has been grateful to me ever since, and has written me letters which have quickened and polished up my mind more than any school, college, or university ever did; besides making me laugh—for she is never not a humorist. She is also no small scholar; Cambridge made her a Doctor of Letters last June. Moreover, I feel sure that, by nature, Religion is, and always has been a bigger thing in her total make-up, than any of those other things, in which her pre-eminence is recognized.

  After Rose’s death in October 1958, for more than a year the present writer was in correspondence with Father Johnson, in connection with the plans for a book of Rose’s letters. He had definite views on the subject and on 24th November, 1959, he wrote:

  Throughout all this book-business, which you have so kindly undertaken, as nobody else could, I have felt that it is most important that it should be a book about Rose—not about Rose and me, which would be utterly misleading. Her letters to me began by her writing to me at a time when she was wanting a priest; just as if she had gone into a church in that state of mind, and had seen a priest whom she recognized go into a confessional-box, and then had suddenly thought that this might be the opportunity for which she was waiting, and had gone into the other part of the box, and had told him about her situation, without attempting to make her confession or asking for absolution—not until five months later, and then not to him. And so these letters began and continued, and gradually came to contain more secular matter, such as, in the case of Rose Macaulay, might well be of interest to people who have never seen the inside of such a box as that, or ever knelt at a prayer-desk with a crucifix above it. I am glad that my letters were not preserved.

  It is much to be thankful for that Father Johnson should have given detailed guidance such as this on the question of how the letters should be presented, and should also have given his blessing to the publication of this book.

  CONSTANCE BABINGTON SMITH

  1950

  August

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  30th August, 1950

  Dear Father Johnson,

  (I hope you don’t dislike typed letters, because I type so much better than I write that I think it is only kind to my friends to do it.) I got back from a month in Italy last night, and, amid a pile of (mostly unwelcome) correspondence, found your letter, a very bright spot. It was indeed nice to hear from you again. And to know that you like that book of mine. Its real name (as published here) was They were Defeated, but the American publishers didn’t like the word “defeated” (I think they were just emerging from a slump!) so called it The Shadow Flies, taking the words of course from the poem I quote. Rather foolish of them, I thought. They were Defeated is what it is about. Every one defeated—Julian Conybeare, Herrick, the Royalists, the Church, etc. I liked writing it, especially the part about Cambridge, which was very real to me, so were—and are —all the people in it. It was a lovely century in Cambridge; or anyhow those immediately pre-civil-war years were. So much poetry, so much flowering of Anglicanism in the middle of Puritanism, so much idealism on both sides. I’m glad you liked it.

  I wonder if you would like my newest novel, to be published in America soon I believe. It is called The World my Wilderness, and is about the ruins of the City, and the general wreckage of the world that they seem to stand for. And about a rather lost and strayed and derelict girl who made them her spiritual home. Anyhow, on the chance that you may care to see it, I am getting my publishers to send you a copy. Perhaps you won’t like it at all. Do not bother to write about it. Though anything you wrote to me about any subject would have interest and pleasure for me. If you were in England, I should probably ask if I might come and talk to you sometimes, and I wish you were. I remember that Retreat so well—though, like you, I don’t remember its position in space or time; but I think the time must have been either just before or soon after the beginning of the first war; the place I feel, for some reason, may have been somewhere in Surrey? But I don’t know. What I do remember is how much what you said helped and stimulated me. It is now very many years since I went to a Retreat or anything at all of that nature; I have sadly lost touch with that side of life, and regret it. We do need it so badly, in this queer world and life, all going to pieces and losing. Most of my younger friends have never had it, and haven’t, therefore, that ultimate sanction for goodness, unselfishness, integrity, kindness, self-denial, which those brought up to believe in God accept at any rate as ideals, even if they have lost the belief. Like the generation of my father and uncles, parsonage-bred (like you), and, though agnostic, so good. I like to think of an uncle1 who died a few years ago; he was Vice-Provost of King’s, and the one I dedicated They were Defeated to; he had been an agnostic (very noble in character) from his undergraduate days on; but when he was dying he said to his sister, who had mentioned God and a future life, “Well, there’s nothing so rum it might not be true,” which pleased my aunt very much.

  I rather wish the rising generation of clergy were more intellectual; so many seem rather chumps; or do I generalise from inadequate experience? I don’t really know many. But I have a feeling that one’s scholarly clerical ancestors might rather turn in their graves at the th
ought of them—or of many of them, for I know intelligent ones. I wonder how it is in America as to this. And, in Puritan New England, how much high Protestant Episcopalianism flourishes, and when you say mass in the garage-chapel, whether it is Anglican or P.E. (I know of course that they are affiliated). In any case, please go on occasionally remembering me when you think of it, for I value that extremely.

  I have built up a library again, partly from family books, partly buying them; though some I can never replace. But one feels rather like a ghost, all papers and letters gone, and all belongings. I found this flat at once after being bombed out; it is small but pleasant, close to Manchester Square. I am now busy with a book on “The Pleasures of Ruins”—interesting to do, but a vast subject. I was looking at some in Italy. Do write again some time, when time has a gap. Thank you for telling me about Fr. Cary1; I hadn’t heard.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Rose Macaulay

  September

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  20th September, 1950

  Dear Father Johnson,

  It was good to get both your letters; thank you so much. I am glad my Anglican and R.C. “Church-going”2 recalled to you those two lovely things—cathedral choirs and organ, and the primitive chanting drone. The setting of the first was actually King’s College chapel—hence the Eton-and-Cambridge lector. It is so beautiful always; the candles, and the boys’ voices, and the vaulted roof. I used to go a lot when we lived in Cambridge, and my darling uncle was Vice-Provost. I heard him read the First Lesson once; it was about Adam and Eve, and he sounded so surprised by it. The second kind of worship, the Latin chanting, goes further back in my memory, and, as you too feel, causes emotion when recalled. You can sing it; I can’t, only in my mind. Perhaps religion should come to us in one of these frames—not too directly. I think the Quakers make a mistake, in having no frame, only direct communication, which can be doubted. I like Latin for prayer; and I like the 16th and 17th century language (as in the collects); both have dignity, and one gets it, so to speak, at one remove.