"My Courage and Skill to Him That Can Get It":Mollie Panter-Downes on London in World War II

Here's someone who deserves a Wiki page: Mollie Panter-Downes.

You remember Mollie? Perhaps you do. She was a sometimes novelist and short story writer, and more importantly the London corespondent for The New Yorker magazine, whose "Letter from London" did so much to form our enduring picture of the doughty British as they fended off the Nazis in World War II.

I've been thinking of Mollie lately as I thumb through a collection called The New Yorker Book of War Pieces (Schockdn, 1988), one of those items that resurfaced in the recent housecleaning. There are a lot of names to remember here: Rebecca West, A. J. Liebling, John Lardner and, at last, John Hersey, whose epochal "Hiroshima" ends the collection. There are others perhaps a tad more recherché: E. J. Kahn, Jr., St. Clair McKelway, Brendan Gill. And Mollie Panter-Downes.

I haven't made an exact count, but Mollie may come first through the tape with number of pieces anthologized here (Liebling is a contender), and it is uncanny how familiar they all sound, to anyone who lived through the period, either in life or in books--familiar even if you have never read them at all. Her picture of England in a troubled time is as much a part of our mythology as all those old Mawsterpiece Theatre soapers that still clog the airwaves on Public Broadcasting.

Here is Mollie on September 3, 1939, just after Hitler crossed the border into Poland: "the London crowds are cool--cooler than they were in 1914--in spite of thundery weather that does it best to scare everybody by staging unofficial rehearsals for air raids at the end of breathlessly humid days." And on May 12, 1940, as Chamberlain fell and Churchill came to power: "London itself seemed much the same as usual except that everyone carried a paper and most people for the first time in months carried a gas mask." And on June 22, after the fall of Paris--though stunned (she says) the British people "took refuge in the classic formula for disaster: calmness, and an increasingly dogged determination to hold back for bitter months--or years, if necessary--a juggernaut that everyone now knows is out to annihilate the nation in weeks."

It's that last one that is really striking. Any fool can say after the fact that "we know they could do it all along." But here is Mollie in the heat of (literally) battle saying: buck up, steady on, things will be all right in the end.

Mollie has not quite vanished into history. Amazon still recognizes the name (link): a couple of her books appear still to be in print, thanks to the dedication of one or two small presses. I have my own copy of Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, a short story collection acquired at Palookaville's best second-hand bookshop ("Merry Christmas 1999, Love--Jessica, XOXO"). A jacket blurb describes her as one of her own characters: her father died at Mons in 1914; she lived for more than 60 years with her family in Surrey; "each day Mollie took a basket with her lunch to a writing hut in the woods where, between 1938 and 1984, she wrote 852 pieces for The New Yorker."

I suspect Mollie may pale by comparison to her more flamboyant opposite number in Paris--that would be Janet Flanner, aka Genet, Flanner the flâneur, bisexual, restless, polygynous, and to boot with a sister named Hildegarde. Flanner does have her own Wiki (link), and it is a treasure; Mollie is relegated to some scattered footnotes (link) ("is this a real name?" one commentator inquires). Oddly enough, Flanner is not so heavily represented in this particular collection, although her "Paris, Germany" is justly recognized as a classic. In the end it may be Mollie's very posture of ordinariness that makes her less visible--hiding in plain sight. Too bad, here is a writer who deserves not to be forgotten.

[You ask--why don't you write the Wiki yourself? Answer, I don't do Wiki. They lock me out for some reason--I think it may have to do with the Google Accelerator. And I have never tried to break through the lock, because I figured that if once I started, I might never stop.]

Update: But there is a New York Times obit (link)--oh and an even better one in The Independent (link)--oh and this book passage (link)--but but but apparently she is not the original for Mrs. Miniver (link).