Ruin Feeling

IN A 1940 article in the magazine Time and Tide, the novelist and scholar Rose Macaulay sought to account for wartime Londoners’ morbid fascination with ruins: “‘There's a good one in my street,’ we say, proud of our own monuments. ‘Makes you think, doesn't it,’ we say. But just what it makes us think, I am not sure.” Macaulay spent the rest of her life pursuing answers to this very question. In May 1941, after leaving home in London to oversee family affairs following the death of her sister, Macaulay returned to find her West End flat completely destroyed, a result of what turned out to be the last and worst major air raid of the Blitz. She lamented, in a letter to a friend, that “I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.” In 1950 Macaulay published The World My Wilderness, her first novel in almost a decade. Set amid the ruins of post-war London, the book's title is taken from a haunting poem attributed to “Anon” but written by the author:

A couple of years later, 1953 saw the publication of a further, extended meditation by Macaulay on the cultural meanings ascribed to architectural decay in any period: her extraordinary Pleasure of Ruins. This defiantly rambling book, a work of non-fiction that sets out to explore the ruin-mindedness of humans across many centuries, continents and cultures, discovers in stony rubbish something meaning- laden, redemptive, even artful. Eighteenth-century Germans had invented the compound Ruinenlust to describe this obsession; resurrecting the term, Macaulay writes of ruin pleasure.

Almost two decades after the publication of Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins, Derek Jarman produced a small-scale watercolour that alludes directly to her theme. Entitled The Pleasure of Ruins and dated 1972 (Plate VI), Jarman's painting features a tiny humanoid figure sitting contemplatively atop a pile of architectural and sculptural fragments.