Art: Among the Ruins

Of a night during the London blitz, Anglo-Irish Poet Louis MacNeice once wrote in Common Sense:

“For the raid of May loth … I had a seat in the stalls, having arranged to spend that night on St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s has already had two direct hits, but Wren’s structure is standing up to it amazingly well (if you go back stage in the cathedral you notice with what extraordinary ingenuity and thoroughness—and solidity—the whole thing is put together). … It was a night of a full moon which half the time was lost in fire clouds, and from midnight till dawn H.E. bombs and incendiaries fell all over the City. … In a little time great tawny clouds of smoke, rolling in a sumptuous Baroque exuberance, had hidden the river completely and there we were on the dome, a Classical island in a more than Romantic Inferno. It was far and away the most astonishing spectacle I have ever seen. . . .”

Last week, during the methodical assault on Germany from the air, the U.S. had a good reason to remember the assault on Britain. The Bombed Buildings of Britain, a handsome record of destruction, was available in book form for U.S. readers (Oxford; $4.50). The Bombed Buildings contains 270 photographs of 196 damaged buildings, and small-size, 18th and 19th-Century prints showing most of the structures in their former states.

Many of these charred, strewn, gaping images, signed by such names as Wren, Adam, Nash, Soane and Stuart, make a moving reaffirmation of their dignity and style. Ruin sometimes adds beauty as well as pathos. Says Architectural Writer J. M. Richards in an eloquent preface: “The architecture of destruction not only possesses an aesthetic peculiar to itself, it contrives its effects out of its own range of raw materials. Among the most familiar are the scarified surface of blasted walls, the chalky substance of calcined masonry, the surprising sagging contours of once rigid girders and the clear siena colouring of burnt-out brick buildings, their rugged cross-walls receding plane by plane, on sunny mornings in the City.”

Among the London buildings pictured:

> St. Paul’s Cathedral, twice hit—once in the choir, once in the north transept. One photograph shows the yawning hole in the transept floor, a huge puncture made not by the bomb itself but by the weight of wreckage which fell after it.

> The Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, whose delicate spire still stands, though the body of the church was wrecked by a direct hit.

> The Church of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, whose “columns, arches, spandrils and dome follow each other with the logic of a Euclidian theorem.” Wren’s great transept is buried in wreckage, and there is a jagged rip in the resetted dome.

> The Palace of Westminster, bearer of Big Ben. The Commons chamber, burnt out, is shown gutted and writhing, its floor heaving under twisted steel.

> Some anonymous buildings, suggesting another paragraph by Poet MacNeice: “And it is heartbreaking, too, to walk through parts of the East End which may not lately have been bombed but which were more or less evacuated under an earl ier terror and left to the rats and the damp —the petrification of the memory of poverty. Street after street of empty stinking homes which will never—or so we hope—be anybody’s homes any more.”