World War II, the welfare state, and postwar “humanism”

“Children is all little 'Itlers these days,” proclaims a character in Henry Green's Loving (1945), one of the best English novels of World War II. Set in an Anglo-Irish mansion in the neutral Republic of Ireland, Loving is about the daily lives of the servants during their mistress's absence. The “little 'Itler” here is the hilariously precocious Albert, an urban evacuee from England who has strangled one of the estate's peacocks with his bare hands. “Oh I screamed out,” recounts his aunt, “but 'e'ad it about finished the little storm trooper.” All the novel's main characters are obsessed by invasions, as well they might be in wartime Ireland, but there is an important sense in which the enemy has already landed. In part, it is this insight - that “'Itler” and the storm troopers aren't out there but right here - that makes Loving so typical of the novels of World War II. If this seems a bleak conclusion to draw from a novel that is otherwise as exuberant as its title suggests, I hope to explain in this chapter why the grimly comic clear-sightedness one encounters in a novel like Loving might itself be seen as characteristic of English fiction in the middle of the twentieth century. Allies and enemies In an essay written a few months before her suicide in 1941, Virginia Woolf spoke of “a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men”: “It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave.” The unconscious impulses that found political expression in Nazism were not a German problem but everyone's problem, and although Woolf would ultimately support World War II (she and her Jewish husband knew well what was at stake), patriotism never came naturally to her.