A fine romance
Anthony Nutting Past Forgetting Kay SummersbyMorgan (Collins £4.95) Thirty years ago, Kay Summersby's account of her love affair with General Eisenhower would almost certainly have been excoriated as a work of the worst possible taste. Today It may all too easily be dismissed by some critics as a piece of pure corn. For myself, however, being neither a latter-day puritan nor one whose literary appetite has been Completely jaded by modern modes, I confess that I found this book both deeply Moving and interesting.
Indeed, as a story of wartime romance it Must surely be one of the most remarkable since that of Admiral Nelson and Emma Hamilton. True, it ended, typically and inevitably, with the General riding off into the sunset to rejoin his wife. But what makes this story unordinary, to say the very least, IS that Eisenhower seriously wanted to divorce his wife and to marry his wartime love after the war ended—and was only Prevented from doing so by a blistering reminder from his military superior, General Marshall, that to do so would be to deny his duty to his country and would spell the end of his military career. Most remarkable of all, the lady in question knew nothing (*this until some twenty-eight years later and four years after the General had died When, herself under sentence of death from liver cancer, she read of it in a newspaper extract from a biography of the late President Truman.
During this long interval of time Kay 'utrimersby had had no reason to believe that, however deeply she was affected by it, her love affair had been other than a brief romantic interlude in the star-spangled Course of Eisenhower's life. Whatever hopes the General may have given her at the end Of the war that somehow she might con!Irlue to be a part of his life, she had few illusions as to the ultimate outcome. As she !Poke so touchingly of her feelings at the 'inning of the romance, 'I loved Ike. That was all that mattered . . . It was folly to think of the future. There was a war. If it had been peacetime, it would have been en 'rely different . . . Then, I believe . . . I Tight have said, "Make up your mind." ut we were living in a different time. In Wartime one has an entirely different aPproach to life . .. After all, we were never sire that there would be a tomorrow. We t ad seen too much. Tomorrow would have k;`) take care of itself.' And when tomorrow s.r,ought only the agony of a sudden, and
uent, parting, she again accepted it as in
vitable, not knowing the truth until the 4t two years of her life. What makes this story especially poignant is not only that it ended in sadness and separation for two people who were deeply in love, but that even at the height of their romance they were able to find so little fulfilment. For one thing, whether from weariness and strain or from some more profound debility, Ike appears to have become more often than not sexually impotent. For another, he was scarcely ever alone with Kay, being constantly surrounded by advisers, staff-officers, secretaries and servants, even during the few brief moments of respite that he was able to snatch while conducting or planning the operations of the Anglo-American armies in North Africa and Europe. Thus his declarations of love had frequently to be confined to a few hurried words scribbled on scraps of paper which he handed to her with verbal instructions to 'tend to this for me,' peremptorily barked out for the benefit of those hangers-on who happened to be close by.
Kay Summersby asserts that all this 'was not as frustrating as one might think.' The knowledge that they loved each other 'was enough for now.' She also seems to have accepted her lover's sexual inadequacies with great compassion and understanding. Ike was living and working at a pressure which denied almost any diversion and everyone around him, including Kay, was being driven as hard as he drove himself. As she reminds us, wartime is different, and values are different; both emotionally and materially, people will settle for less than in normal times.
Kay Summersby had been conditioned to this, even before she met her General, when she became engaged to a young American officer whom she only saw at infrequent intervals. And when he was killed she realised, as so many other women in her position must have done, that she 'had never really known him,' which shocked her as much as the knowledge that now she never would. Thus when she afterwards fell in love with Ike and he with her, she was fully prepared to accept the inevitable constraints and to settle for little more than a quixotic consummation.
In places Kay Summersby has larded her story with too many unimportant details of daily life in the General's headquarters. But she has also given us some fascinating insights into Ike's character as well as a number of amusing anecdotes about some of the many VIPs, such as King George VI, Churchill and Roosevelt, whom she met when they came to visit the Allied Commander-in-Chief. She demonstrates vividly the contradictions of Ike's nature, showing how he could be warm with some and unapproachable to others, touchingly thoughtful at times yet on occasions violently angry, informal with his close friends but pernickety about all forms of military discipline, and above all relentless in driving himself to his work and angrily resentful of anyone who had the temerity to suggest that he take a break.
At the end it is difficult not to feel saddened, if not shocked, by the brusqueness with which Kay is dismissed from Ike's life, having been led to believe that after adopting American citizenship she could continue to serve on his staff when he took over as Chief of Staff in Washington. However much she may have told herself that hers was just a wartime romance destined inevitably to end whenever the war ended, it is unforgivable that she was not even sent a brief farewell note and that she learned of her dismissal by Ike merely from a signal to his European headquarters, saying she had been dropped from the roster of his Washington staff.
Yet, in spite of this and in spite of all the frustrations she had to endure, she could say at the end that she had no regrets, that 'it was all perfect.' And although she admitted she was hurt, she wrote not one word of censure of the man who hurt her, accepting as she had accepted everything else in her relationship with Ike that he did it because he believed his duty allowed of no alternative. All of which makes this a remarkable story told by a remarkable lady.
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