Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - the BBC in the War

When you read a novel like this it reminds you that a novel can do all sorts of things. It consists of characters interacting, usually. Usually, there is a main character whose sensibility is made clear to the reader or several such characters, and things happen to the characters and they change, possibly.

I am not sure this book is about any of the characters, who are employed by the BBC in the war. There are young women who act as assistants in the department of a middle-aged man, Sam, who is brilliant but not aware as he is obsessed with the technical difficulties of recording outside broadcasts. He never seems to go home. "Pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC's pale furniture... He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC's frightful house ties... Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts." He likes holding the hands of the female assistants and telling them his troubles (his obsession with recording the life of the nation, the human voice) and he goes to sleep with his head on Vi's shoulder. Vi is the most reliable of the young girl assistants.

 He has a friend, Jeff, who is the Director of programme planning and is under terrible stress. We first meet him drinking double whiskies in the BBC canteen. He is described like this: "His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian's but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC... DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it."

There is a war on, London is very hazardous, and someone gets pregnant. There are young female employees worried about boyfriends in the forces, and male employees waiting to be called up. They spend the day chatting, of course they do, and gossiping.

Broadcasting House in Langham Place

The BBC, in this novel, is sometimes a single entity. "The BBC knew that for a fact." It is housed in a building that looks like a ship, a great cruise liner.

Jeff, early in the novel, finds that his place at the BBC is liable to a re-shuffle, and he may be sent out of London, because he is invited to welcome a French general who wants to address the British nation, and surmising that the General wants to tell Britain to give up fighting the Germans, pulls the plugs on him, so the nation hears 10 minutes of silence instead. In a way, his action is entirely admirable, and if the Ministry of Information or the War Office had heard the French General's address they might well have stepped in to control the BBC themselves, which they never did.

"The BBC, in the face of the grave doubts of the Services, persisted obstinately in telling the truth in their own way."

But the Ministries want to blame Jeff for stepping in and pulling the plugs without any consultation with anyone.

"The BBC loyally defended their own. As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language, and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. Determined to go on doing what they thought best without official interference, ..."

The Assistant Deputy Director-General feels that Jeff's nerves have been strained by planning the whole of the Home and the Forces Programming, and suggests he reads Cranford to soothe himself to sleep every night. "The whole notion was comforting, but in fact Jeff had never been nervous and was now arguably the calmest person in the whole building."

(It's strange to think that Hyde Park was full of young people lounging about, (as usual) specifically the Free French, who came in two groups which fought with each other, and at the same time there was an anti-aircraft battery there.)

Sam is furious with Jeff for not getting a recording of the General for the archives. All the political stuff passes him by. He's worried about the Archives - they have no recordings of Stukas, for example. Jeff has no secretary which allows him to ignore half his correspondence as not worth a reply.

I found myself researching to find out who might have been the original for "Jeff", but I found nothing. 

On the trail, in "Broadcasts from the Blitz" I find: 

"On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, nearly a thousand German planes, bombers escorted by fighters, darkened the skies over London. After a two-hour attack, another wave arrived. The principal targets were the docks along the Thames, and the Ministry of Home Security reported that 430 persons were killed and 1,600 were badly injured...

...For the next fifty-seven nights, London was hit again and again. For a while, the bombers came by day as well, but the Royal Air Force destroyed so many planes by daytime that by October a day-time raid was a rarity. When darkness fell, however, London was blasted. London had been heavily bombed earlier,...It was the relentlessness of the blitz that set it apart. It was the real test of Britain's ability to stand alone and survive. An estimated 20,000 tons of high explosive were dropped on London within nine months."

Quantities of metal beds are brought into the concert hall, which becomes a dormitory for staff who never go home, and tickets are issued to staff who need a bed for the night. People of all grades climb on each other's bunks. The snoring echoes off the walls.

You find first-hand descriptions of this here.

Here is the most beautiful paragraph in the novel, and indeed, in most books there are no paragraphs as beautiful.

As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi. As office managers, they were no more than adequate, but now, as autumn approached, with the exiles [the French, the Poles, the Czechs etc] crowded awkwardly into their new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen's one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.

This comes about halfway through the novel. After this, a new character is introduced, and there is a romance. But before this romance, the novel is about a lowly BBC employee's view of London in wartime and it is a portrait of an organisation, which is unusual for a novel, and has that light, masterly touch one sometimes finds in Graham Greene or Muriel Spark.

There are two literary allusions which come to the surface right at the end of the novel. One is about Shakespeare's The Tempest, which had me casting about trying to see the novel as a reworking of the story of Prospero and Aerial, and the other is an allusion to T.S. Eliot - the main character says that Eliot (he knows him by sight) walks "in measure, like a dancer" and the title  of the book is from one of his great poems:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think they will sing to me

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

In 1945 it had been bombed a few times and patched up.

There is also an American character called Mac, who broadcasts to the US, telling the Amercians how the English behave in the Blitz, and it is possible to cast him as Aerial, because of the way he magically turns up scattering oranges and cheeses amongst the staff, going on air to evoke the scenes of ravaged London, even broadcasting the sound of the bombing from the roof of the BBC, and breezes out again - and this made me research the BBC during the war. There was a famous young US broadcaster called Ed Murrow, who played this role in the Blitz, but he wasn't the only one, and Murrow actually lived in London for a couple of years before the war, so he didn't "fly in" the way this character does.
You can hear one of Ed Murrow's broadcasts on the BBC page here
Another possibility for the original of Mac is Quentin Reynolds.