SOURCE: Austin, Allan E. “The Power of the Past.” In Elizabeth Bowen: Revised Edition, pp. 48-69. Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1989.

[In the following excerpt, Austin discusses Bowen's last four novels—The Heat of the Day, A World of Love, The Little Girls, and Eva Trout—which reveal the writer's renewed sense of adventure and willingness to address fresh challenges.]

Remember that all our failures
are ultimately failures in love.

—Iris Murdoch, The Bell

Elizabeth Bowen's third group and final four novels disclose her readiness to set herself new and challenging problems. In part, of course, she had to move on from The Death of the Heart, which carried her earlier material to a finely realized logical conclusion. Aside from this novel, her last work is in many ways her most interesting; for it shows the author working with a new sense of adventure. And, if none of these novels quite match the perfection of The Death of the Heart, they reflect the touch of a poised and knowing craftsman. The Heat of the Day (1949) is the most ambitious of her novels; A World of Love (1955) and The Little Girls (1964), her most intellectually intricate; and Eva Trout (1969), the most bizarre.

The Heat of the Day, so chiefly in wartime London, aims to make a major statement about the conditions preceding and fomenting World War II. In addition to being a professed “big” novel, it is Bowen's most daring one. As such, it has vulnerable aspects some critics have readily noted. In this novel, as in no other, the characters function symbolically; they stand for classes of people and social tendencies as Bowen saw them function between the wars and fulfill themselves in the Holocaust. In outline, the central love triangle, composed of a woman who has abdicated the aristocratic responsibilities of her class and two men who are a spy and a counterspy, appears improbable and melodramatic. But, if the threesome is viewed as moving through the dense wartime milieu with its pervasive sense of exaggeration and unexpectedness, the improbability is lessened. The heroine, in spite of the significance she must bear, is possibly the best realized one in the author's gallery.

A World of Love is the one instance in which Bowen's style assumes a disproportionate importance. The verbal preciousness is distracting, if not finally destructive, since it creates difficulties of comprehension that are out of all proportion to the weight of the subject matter. Like To the North, Friends and Relations, and The House in Paris, this novel is a work with parts rather than a whole piece. Considered in conjunction with The Last September and The Death of the Heart, however, A World of Love affords an interesting combination and a reworking of previous material toward a new realization. It shares with The Last September an Irish setting and insights into the Irish character; like The Death of the Heart, it employs more than one heroine. As a literary performance, A World of Love is clever, but to make an additional claim for it is difficult.

The Little Girls, like The Heat of the Day, is symbolic, but it differs in the degree of ambivalence attached to its symbols. Consequently, this novel is Bowen's most challenging book; this fact is all the more surprising in the light of its taut and racy style. We might conceivably be reminded of Wallace Steven's poetry with its pure, crystalline exterior and its metaphysical interior. In this novel, the author presents what must constitute the ultimate variation upon her innocent heroine character by creating one who is sixty-one years old.

By virtue of their emphasis on the past as it impinges upon the present, these three novels constitute a group. The topic has always interested Bowen, but it is one she had not previously dealt with so pervasively or so radically. Compared with her other books, these three quite simply encompass more time since most of the principal characters are older: those in The Heat of the Day are around forty; those in A World of Love, over fifty; the women in The Little Girls, in their sixties.

These books emphasize that the quality of an individual's life is significantly influenced by his attitude to his accrued memories and experiences. Characters in each of the stories are shown in the midst of life as acting upon distorted and delimiting recollections, and they are forced by circumstances to confront this fact. Thus they are afforded an opportunity for reassessment and readjustment toward a more vital existence.

Eva Trout is somewhat apart in arriving at a negative conclusion. It too shares a concern for the past, but the heroine, rendered permanently inept by a careless upbringing and burdened with inherited wealth, is unable to gain self-knowledge or an achieved life. The author's last novel is both grotesque and dark.

THE HEAT OF THE DAY

Elizabeth Bowen's one attempt at the big novel, The Heat of the Day, is her most powerful one, but it is not so perfectly realized as The Death of the Heart. Nonetheless, these remain as the twin peaks of her work. Described as both a war novel and a love story, the novel is either only in a limited sense. The impact of the war, particularly the bombing of the civilian population of London in 1942, is tellingly rendered. But Bowen is not interested in the war per se; rather, it is presented as the logical culmination of the between-the-wars wasteland. The war, then, while vividly real, an undeniable actuality, moves imagistically beyond actual history.

Prewar conditions, conveyed through the lives of a handful of characters, are analogous with the social situation in any other Bowen novel—situations that, as previously noted, have their own counterforce built into them. As one character observes, “Dunkirk was waiting there in us …” (263). With a situation so radical as a war, it is not feasible to postulate recovery for the generation for whom the landscape of blitz is an inevitable inheritance; with the war comes an exhilarating release from the torpidity of the wasteland, but the forces of shock, having to be extreme, are largely self-destructive. In a book, however, which regards the war as a social watershed, it is appropriate that there be the subsidiary theme of the fresh start and that it be expressed through members of the new generation who will inherit a world cleansed by the massive convulsion.

No Bowen novel suffers more from story summary than this one; indeed, some of its melodrama is bound to sound incredible. But, as we have observed, the heightened wartime atmosphere helps absorb the unusual incidents. Few readers would deny the author gains a “willing suspension of disbelief.” The central story revolves around Stella Rodney, a handsome woman in her forties; her lover Robert Kelway; and her would-be lover, Harrison, a skulking counterspy. Stella is a relatively normal character, but the two men are aberrations. Stella and Robert, both engaged in secret government work, have been in love for two years. Harrison, a man Stella has met only once previously, contacts for claiming urgent business and comes to her flat. He has two pieces of information and a proposition to make her: first, Robert Kelway is passing information to the enemy; second, only he, Harrison, knows this fact. His proposition is quite to the point: if Stella will become his mistress he will not report Robert. Clearly, his situation has all the makings of a Graham Greene novel with its usual atmosphere of seediness, but Bowen's treatment is quite different. The reader is surprised that Stella's reaction to Harrison is not considerably sharper than it is. But not until near the end of the novel will the reader come to understand the calmness of her response. Quite obviously the book begins with very strong appeals to the reader's curiosity. The odd nature of Harrison, the truth of his accusations, and Stella's reaction are all to be wondered at.

Early commentators recognized the relationship of The Heat of the Day to E. M. Forster's Howards End. In his novel, Forster draws into contact representatives of the three broad classes of English society: Margaret Schlegel, middle class; Henry Wilcox, upper class; and Leonard Bast, lower class. Bowen offers Stella and her son Roderick as representatives of the upper class; Harrison and Robert of the middle; and, the principal character of an important subplot, Louie Lewis, of the lower. In a comparison of the two novels, William Heath makes this most useful observation: “the distance between their final attitudes can suggest a great deal about the forty-year period that separates [them].”¹

For Forster, the Schlegels represent the hope of a healthy society, the responsible balance between the “prose” of public demands (the overly abstract Henry) and the “poetry” of private need (the overly subjective Leonard). Dealing with a situation that is fait accompli, Bowen places the responsibility for chaos upon the middle class, represented by the Kelway family. Her treatment of the Rodneys is dualistic; Stella must share in the blame for war because she largely abdicated the responsibilities of her class, but Roderick, in planning to modernize the estate he inherits in Ireland, carries hope into the future. And Louie, too, with her new baby and her own form of courage and integrity, is to be a source of strength in the new order.

The one piece of literature, however, permeating the book is Hamlet. Bowen could hardly have selected allusions to another work to underline more readily the heavy, black atmosphere that hangs over much of The Heat of the Day. There is much to remind one of the drama: Stella, long involved in self-debate; Harrison, on his first appearance, looming up from amid tombstones; parents guilty by virtue of selfishness; a mad woman speaking sense; a trip across water leading to action; Roderick ready, at the close, to take command. It is obvious there is something “rotten in the state,” and there are allusions to the times being out of joint.

Several weeks pass before Stella confronts Robert with her information. Robert denies it. Shortly thereafter, Harrison tells Stella he knows she has spoken to Robert, and he rather convincingly pinpoints the very night because Robert has altered the pattern of his behavior just as Harrison predicted he would when he became aware he was being watched. In the penultimate chapter Robert admits the truth of Harrison's claim and seeks to justify his actions to Stella before he either slips or falls to his death from the roof of her apartment house. Previous to this admission of guilt, he has taken Stella to his home, Holme Delme, and, through her contact with his mother and his sister, Ernestine, she acquires a context for his final disclosures. The Holme Delme sequence contains the most castigating satire of the Bowen oeuvre.

Among Mrs. Kelway's antecedents are the father in Katherine Mansfield's “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and, perhaps even more directly, the loathsome “Grannie” of D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy. Such descriptive phrases as “diamond-like” and “ice-blue” have a particularly Lawrencean ring. Mrs. Kelway has dominated her home, has crushed her husband, and has sought to mold her children to her dehumanized sense of life. The sign at the entrance to the Holme Delme driveway is, “Caution Hidden Drive.” Mr. Kelway, now dead, clearly was never taken seriously or permitted any self-expression; he was “only nominally allowed the fiction of being” the master.

Within her living room, Mrs. Kelway sits knitting (the fate of the nation?), and she is protected or withdrawn behind a series of screens. She is a version of the stereotyped Queen Victoria loftily stating “we are not amused.” Stella quickly discovers the impossibility of conversation with her, for Mrs. Kelway is conscious only of what she herself says. Willful and inhuman, she is characterized by the imagery of the hunt and war: “decoy,” “strategic,” “command.” To Stella, she is “wicked,” and what is most frightening is the indication that she is not unique but simply representative of a whole race of women. She is the solidification of a type that is life-denying and power conscious. The whole niggling, self-righteous, self-asserting approach to existence is captured in the great fuss over three pennies for Stella in order for her to mail a letter for Mrs. Kelway when she returns to London. Stella is appalled.

It is supremely ironic that this woman who spouts such comments as, “I have never thought of what I wanted,” and “It is not a question of happiness,” should be known as “Muttikins” (250). Suffering a self-conceived martyrdom, Mrs. Kelway is determined that hell shall be everyone's fate—and achieves her wish with the war. Robert, dispirited at his deepest level, says, “I was born wounded; my father's son” (263). In his room, Stella find the walls lined with dozens of photographs of Robert at all ages and in all of the appropriate poses: with the great black dog, smiling in white flannels, standing next to a bright, attractive young woman, and so forth. He has not created a life; he has simply stepped into the prearranged poses. Robert tells Stella, “Each time I come back again into it I'm hit in the face by the feeling that I don't exist …” (112). He is one of the “ruined boys” W. H. Auden speaks of in “Consider.” The only communication in his home is in a “dead language” that gives rise to “repression, doubts, fears, subterfuges, and fibs” (247).

A fine touch is the fact that Mrs. Kelway and her daughter provide wartime sanctuary for two children. Mrs. Kelway likes to remind her son that she has taken the children “when it was not convenient …” (241). The situation is forcefully poignant viewed through the eyes of the girl Anne: “Never a heartbeat; never the light disregarding act, the random word or spontaneous kiss; never laughter … anger always in a smoulder. … Though she did not know it, she had never seen anyone being happy …” (254).

Robert has achieved a profound insight into the force of the middle-class power: “What else but an illusion could have such power?” (116). It is the nature of reality to reveal flaws, sooner or later, but these can be circumvented by the make-believe of self-importance and appropriateness. Lies, because they are total abstractions, are always true. But, whatever he has become, Robert has escaped being another Ernestine who, “rather like a dog,” enjoys greater pleasure with a dog than with another human being, and whose face contains an “absense of human awareness” that is to Stella “quite startling” (102).

By revolting, Robert has avoided her fate, but the great danger in reaction is always overreaction. Bowen characterizes Robert's siding with dictatorial powers as “romanticism fired once too often” (268). The final straw for Robert, so far as his society is concerned, was Dunkirk, where he was wounded. Apparently, he had gone to war seeing it as a sign of new hope, but after watching the “army of freedom queuing up to be taken off by pleasure boats,” he was finished with England (263). One of the book's sad paradoxes is that his assertion of individuality rewarded him with a rich love affair this very assertion foredoomed.

Bowen is careful to present Robert as a revolutionary rather than as a Nazi sympathizer, for, if he is anti-England, he is not pro-German. The reader, along with Stella, sees Robert before his death not so much as a traitor but as a corrupt human who seized upon an unfortunate doctrine. He is a man who has chosen to rise above or to ignore nationalism: “there are no more countries left,” he says, though telling Stella she is his country (258). What he seeks is change and the elimination of “the muddled, mediocre, damned” (259). Like his card-carrying fellow travelers pursued by McCarthyism in America a decade later, Robert has given up on democracy where people are “kidded along from cradel to grave” (259). The Nazis are, for him, in the position most likely to accomplish the ends he desires; they are destroyers, if not builders. Muddle has left him desiring the clear and simple, and in Nazism he sees order. Stella can sympathize up to a point with Robert, but she can see that he has a greatly oversimplified worldview and that he has lost sight of humanity in his own negative drive. There is reason to believe Bowen sees Hitler as simply a manifestation of the Kelway way of life, and she believes that he rose to power on the backs of Germany's counterparts to the Kelways. At one point she characterizes the twists and turns of life in the upstairs of Holme Delme as “swastika-arms” (249). And there are also suggestions that Harrison's work is not unlike that of the Gestapo, implying that both combatants are alike. Thus, the novel is disclosing not simply the nature of England but the troubles underlying all of Europe or the Western world.

To turn to Harrison is not, surprisingly, to move away from Robert. Near the end of the novel, Harrison tells Stella his Christian name is Robert. Robert and Harrison are thus mirror images—the one postulates the other. If the one has had too much home, the other has had too little. If Robert has yielded too much of himself to the private will, Harrison has dehumanized himself through submission to the public will. Throughout, Bowen has hinted at the links between the men. Before he leaves her flat to die, Robert hears Stella explain that Harrison has him “at heart” (274). Only Robert justifies and provides Harrison with an identity. Privately, Harrison admits liking the war because it gives him a stature he otherwise lacks.

Little of Harrison's past is disclosed, but this lack indicates the point: he is rootless man. Stella appeals to him not as a source of passion but as a gracious woman with the ability to create a warm home; he seems happier with her flat than with her, and he is never more pleased than when she asks him to bring her a glass of milk from the kitchen. Indeed, he rather pathetically tells her that, for him, her flat is home. Since Robert can give Stella his heart but not his mind, it follows that Harrison's attachment to Stella is essentially in his mind; he cannot give her his heart, for, indeed, he may not have one to give. After Robert's death, he comes to visit Stella in her new flat. She rejects him, and he accepts this rejection “with relief” (311).

By this time, Stella has succumbed to exhaustion, all feeling spent. As she and Harrison sit talking, while an air raid is in progress, she tells him she may marry. When he tells her she owes it to her future husband to seek shelter, she denies it matters—love or death, she will take her chances. She accepts her role as a child of her times, and she knows she shares in the corruption of her generation. When, years ago, her husband, ironically named Victor, had returned wounded from World War I, he shocked her by claiming she did not love him and had departed to live with the nurse who had cared for him. He no sooner had gained a divorce when he died.

At that time, her whole sorry travail of dislocation and doomed love had begun. Victor's family believes that Stella had provoked the divorce, and she has said nothing to deny it, preferring, as she tells Harrison, to appear a monster rather than a fool. Roderick, reared believing this of his mother, had learned the truth from Cousin Nettie, and had confronted his mother with it. Admitting the truth, she had asserted that its revelation came too late: “Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts …” (220). She admits to Harrison, finally, that “there's an underside to me that I've hated, that you almost make me like …” (219). In the simplest terms, then, the main story of The Heat of the Day is the failure on a grand scale of feeling.

This being so, it is proper to discover in the characters Roderick and Louie a new purity and honesty of feeling. Roderick surprises his mother with his interest in his ailing Cousin Nettie and in hopes and plans he makes for his land in Ireland. The brief Irish passage appears as a momentary picture of sanity in an otherwise blighted world, and it is there that word of Montgomery's victory comes. Roderick, apparently, will find his roots in the remote rather than the recent past, and, in so doing, he will attach himself to a tradition of stability.

Louie, for her part, suggests the human capacity to endure, to withstand confusion, distortion, and disaster without losing her desire for basic domestic values. Left a war widow with a baby son, she is determined he will have a happy home, and her hard-won achievement of wisdom seems to assure it. Hers is the final vision of the future, the enduring grace and beauty of the three swans.

The Heat of the Day is a prime illustration of a novel whose parts, being greater than the whole, are sufficient to make a work distinguished in spite of evident weaknesses. Some of its scenes are among the author's most memorable—the opening one in Regent's Park, Stella at Cousin Francis's funeral, Stella visiting Mount Morris, Roderick visiting Nettie, Louie with her friend Connie, and the meal in the underground restaurant. And the chief glories, of course, are the vivid descriptions of London under the blitz. No other novel gave the author more trouble than this one. We may intuit why this was so while acknowledging its justification.

A WORLD OF LOVE

After her wartime fiction and The Demon Lover (1945) story collection in particular, Elizabeth Bowen could hardly have been expected to return untouched by the increased sense of psychic aberration the blitz and the buzz bombs gave to her more normal concerns—to such typical themes as hurt feelings and young love in a family situation—as she does in A World of Love. The connection between this novel and The Heat of the Day is rather explicit since Bowen's opening sentence represents something of an in-joke, “The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.”² Though this novel is an experiment that was not successful and is, consequently, one of Bowen's least satisfactory books, it is interesting for several reasons. Among the foremost of these is its similarity to her earliest novels, The Hotel and The Last September. Like them, it has a beautiful girl in a relatively confined world whose instinctual quest for womanhood transmits shock waves that generally enlarge to the circumference of her sphere, but these narrative basics become transmuted into a fascinating variation through both the configurative and the verbal creations of the author's increasingly metaphysical approach. In A World of Love, Jane Danby, twenty, with “a face perfectly ready to be a woman's but not yet so,” and her sister Maud, twelve, whose “unmistakable content was more force,” become the instruments that harrow their home (11, 171). Jane has just returned from completing an English education paid for by her Aunt Antonia, who has accompanied her home on one of her frequent sojourns. Home is Montefort, owned by Antonia, a small, Irish country manor, and it is presided over by Lilia Danby and farmed by her husband Fred, Antonia's illegitimate cousin.

Not unexpectedly, the book opens with Montefort in a moribund state. It is “half-sleep,” and “The door no longer knew hospitality …” (9). Conditions have actually been thus for twenty years, and at the root of the trouble is the former owner, Guy. Details from the past that account for the unsatisfactory lives and relationships of the elder Danby's are released throughout the novel. Antonia, her cousin Guy, and Fred, the “by-blow,” have grown up at Montefort. Gifted with tremendous vitality, Antonia and Guy have lived something of a Wuthering Heights existence. Fred recalls, “You and he were something out of the common. … The way you two were, you could have run the world” (120).

By the time World War I began and Guy had joined the army, Antonia had fallen in love with him, but, during the course of one of his leaves, he had become engaged to an English girl, Lilia, then seventeen. By the time Guy had departed for the last time to France in 1918, he had acquired another woman, a fact known by both Antonia and Lilia, who have yet to meet. Not until the end of the novel do the two women bring this information into the open. As the narrator eventually observes, Guy “had stirred up too much; he had scattered round him more promises as to some dreamed-of extreme of being than one man could have hoped to live to honour” (145).

After Guy's death in battle, Antonia inherits Montefort and decides to do something for Lilia. This decision, in retrospect, appears unfortunate, for “never had intervention proved more fatal” (18); the narrator suggests that Lilia would have been better left alone. At any rate, when, after ten years, Lilia remains unwed, Antonia feels justified in taking matters into her own hands. She tells Fred, who has been drifting about, that she will turn Montefort over to him for a share in the profits if he will marry Lilia. An obvious admirer of Guy, Fred agrees that “Guy's girl” is worth a look. The wedding takes place, though not until Antonia has threatened Lilia with the withdrawal of additional assistance if she refuses.

When Jane is seven, her mother bolts for London and announces she will not return. Once more Antonia threatens her; and, after softening her, Antonia dispatches Fred to bring her home. Fred's wooing succeeds, they return, and the reunion is marked by the conception of Maud. Since all of these events precede the story proper, it should be evident that A World of Love is burdened with more exposition than any other Bowen novel. However, while all of this information helps explain why Montefort is not a happy home, it does not fully account for the present states of the adults. These states are implied as the present action—the reactive action for which Montefort is more than due—unfolds.

While rummaging around in the attic, Jane finds, or, as the narrator views it, is found by, a bundle of love letters. The letters were written by Guy while he was at Montefort to an unknown person. A ready recipient for romance, Jane becomes enamored of them. When Guy writes, “I wish you were,” Jane can cry, “I am!” Not unexpectedly the letters have considerable impact on the whole house, revivifying thoughts of Guy especially for Antonia and Lilia. The letters create tensions for three emotionally intense days (the country-side, meanwhile, is suffering prostrating heat), at the end of which they are burned by a wiser Jane, symbolically releasing the omnipresent Guy, and conditions at Montefort have altered obviously for the better.

What gradually emerges is the extent of Guy's impact upon these people. Having been dazzled by his tremendous energy, they have never truly comprehended his death, which explains why the narrator sees him as a presence rather than as a ghost. It might be assumed he has remained as a force in their memories, but this is not the case: “not memories was it but expectations which haunted Montefort. His immortality was in their longings, while each year mocked the vanishing garden” (145). Guy's contemporaries are never unaware that “The living [are] living in his life-time. … They were incomplete” (65). Living in these terms consists in enduring a timeless limbo.

Perhaps Lilia's waiting is the most strained of all, for her whole existence as Guy's intended (“if not the Beloved, what was Lilia?”) is frozen in a state of suspension. Like Stella in The Heat of the Day, Lilia has lived a lie—as if she preferred, like Stella, to be a monster rather than a fool in her own eyes, although this cognition implies more self-awareness on her part than the text allows. It is more accurate to say she has never really permitted herself to confront the truth, for, once a true reassessment of Guy begins to take place, she can admit to herself that “not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him” (72).

For her part, Antonia has acted as if it were necessary to keep everything going, to keep Guy's world intact until his return. Her relationship with Lilia appears as almost the only noteworthy event of her life, or of their lives: “Thrown together, they had adhered: virtually, nothing more than this had happened to them since their two girlhoods” (74). Much of her time literally consists of putting in time, sleeping late, drinking alone, napping, lying on the beach. Antonia's sharpness and bossiness are those of a person bored and expecting to stay so (interestingly, she calls the vital Jane “a bore”).

Fred, the man caught in the middle, is aware that he is Guy's substitute and that, as such, he has hardly been fairly regarded for himself. He, of course, knows nothing of yet another woman. Of the three, he is the only one who has sought to remain somewhat vital—if the rumors of Irish lasses down the lane are true. Denied the proper role of man of the family, as Maud takes occasion to indicate to Antonia, he has channeled himself into hard work.

Jane, Lilia, and Antonia all experience the same doubts when they begin to emerge from their respective states of illusion; they cannot be certain of their immediate direction. Lilia thinks, “What had now happened must either kill her or, still worse, force her to live …” (72). The ludicrous situation of seeing the beautiful Jane having her first love affair with a packet of letters brings both Lilia and Jane up short. Officially, the fiction that the letters rightfully belong to Lilia persists to the close, but she and Antonia know otherwise and, in the end, so too does Jane. Lilia's first active response to the sense of change in the air is to have her hair cut in the recent style, which represents a return to an earlier day when bobbling and shingling were fashionable.

But this symbolic attempt to retrieve time results in an unexpected confrontation. While Lilia is sitting alone in the Montefort garden, she suddenly senses the approach of someone—she is certain that it is Guy—when in walks Fred. He, it appears, was and is her destiny. He has brought her the letters, which he has taken from Maud who had taken them from under the rock where they had been hidden (abandoned?) by Jane, in the belief that they are hers. Lilia is touched by his act, and the next thing Montefort witnesses is their driving off together for a spin in the old Danby Ford. When Lilia later admits to Antonia that she knew of Guy's other woman, her settlement with the past is complete, and her emergence as a “new woman” seems assured.

It is Maud who starts Jane on her road to awareness and who provides the finishing touches to Antonia's emergence as a more sympathetic being. Traversing the thigh-high bracken along the river, enfolded in a romantic mood, Jane is suddenly accosted by Maud, who yells, first, “What are you playing?” and, then, “What are you pretending about that tree?” (70-71). These questions are sufficient to make Jane feel foolish and recognize the silliness of her affair with Guy. She is now ready for a second test, and this comes in the form of a real letter from the nouveau riche English woman who has recently purchased the local castle. Vesta Latterly, having earlier spotted Jane and thinking the girl's beauty would be an adornment at her table, invites her to a dinner party. While A World of Love largely concerns itself with the dangers of past events, it also presents a counterstatement about the poise and sense of responsibility a past can bestow—a lesson Jane learns at the castle. And a lesson she needs to learn, since, daughter of Montefort, she has “an instinctive aversion from the past … a sort of pompous imposture …” (48).

The Latterly world proves phantasmagoric. Vesta's circle is comprised of hulks who have surrendered their soul to Mamon—as Jane recognizes. An older Irishman comparing the past and present tells her, “These days, one goes where the money is—with all due respect to this charming lady. Those days, we went where the people were” (94). Jane knows Guy often frequented the castle, and, when there is an empty place at the table, she imagines him present, not now as her lover, but as her ancestor from a nobler time. Though tipsy with her first martini, she can see that Guy is more real than those present, for, as old Terrance has told her, “You can't buy the past” (93). Jane's acceptance of Montefort and its heritage is akin to Lois Farquar's discovery of the reality of Danielstown in The Last September.

Rather ironically, through the dissolute Vesta Jane meets the man who may prove to be a real lover. Unable to meet the son of an acquaintance who is flying in from Colorado, Vesta sends Jane with her chauffeur to Shannon to meet him. He proves a tall, handsome young man, and, as they confront each other. “They no sooner looked but they loved” (224). Out of context, this sudden love may appear as unduly sentimental, even for a highly poetic novel. Coming as it does, however, in a novel troubled by subjectivism, it serves as a judgment on the willingness of one who has demonstrated her capacity to distinguish reality and fantasy to avail herself of the creative “chance” of life.

Antonia's initial response to Guy's resurrection through the letters verges on the pantheistic. She feels the old force of Guy upon her emanating from the darkness of the night: “She was met at once like a wind-like rushing toward her out of the dark—her youth and Guy's from every direction. … All round Montefort there was going forward an entering back again into possession: the two, now one again, were again here …” (113). Antonia feels as if “Doom was lifted from her” and that “time again was into the clutch of herself and Guy” (113-14). Her near mystical experience is like the final intensity of light, the orgasmic sputter, before the bulb dims.

But, in the dawn of the day after, Antonia is confronted by too much evidence that the static Montefort world she has expended her energy and effort to sustain is breaking up, and that, far from living in a timeless world, the years have taken their toll of her. Lilia and Fred seem bound now to have at this late date, if not love, a relationship truly their own. Lilia's admission of Guy's other woman and her refusal to accept the packet of letters in effect earn her release from the past. Jane's entry into the Latterly world, if only as a passing observer, informs Antonia that the girl is moving beyond her grasp and into a life of her own. Angered over Jane's first contact with the castle, Antonia is mild and interested as Jane departs into Vesta's sphere again at the close.

It is Maud, however, who administers, unintentionally, the final blows to Antonia's hardened mold. Like an emerging spirit, she comes spouting forth “maledictions” from the Psalms. When Maud expresses her views about her father's role, or about what his role should be in the family, Antonia must confess, “Maud as a character had to be reassessed …” (166). Antonia, like Jane before her, is forced to assess her conduct from the cold light of Maud's viewpoint, and the experience is discomfiting: Antonia flees her own bedroom, leaving “the field to Maud” (171). Maud's final impact results from her devotion to Big Ben, whose confirmation of nine o'clock on the radio she eagerly awaits each evening. Sitting in the dining room hearing “passionless Big Ben,” Antonia flinches before “The sound of time, inexorably coming as it did, at once … absolute and fatal” (193). At the same time Jane, studying her aunt, thinks: “And I shall never see Antonia again. … Something has happened. Somehow she's gone,—She's old” (194).

Throughout, the narrator indirectly comments on Guy through Maud's imaginary companion, Gay David. Quite like the living members of her family, Gay is subjected to rough handling from Maud. And, if Guy's contemporaries have given him debilitating obeisance, Gay receives an unceasing flow of punches and kicks. Maud's most obvious predecessor in the novels is Theodora Thirdman of Friends and Relations. The narrator, along with Antonia, may well ask of Maud, “what might the future not have to fear from her?” But in a world where the temptation to effortless ennui is so great, such people are shown to be valuable.

A World of Love may be the author's covert criticism of Ireland with Guy representing the debilitating hold of the Irish past on the present and the impressionistic dreamlike style parodying the sense of unreality disarming everyday life. Whether the novel is related specifically to Ireland or not, it is a cautionary tale. The need to open windows of closed entities to the fresh air of actuality is recurringly necessary. The concluding sentence is richly ambiguous in the best Bowen manner—“They no sooner looked but they loved”—since love is both the great reality and the potent illusion.

THE LITTLE GIRLS

The Little Girls is Elizabeth Bowen's most intricate and subtle novel: intricate in the relationship of its components and subtle in its psychology. Allusiveness is carried to a tantalizing edge where one more step would plunge everything into an incomprehensible state. Yet the surface almost belies this allusiveness; the author has never sustained sprightlier pacing or more rapid dialogue. This engaging surface and a clever unfolding of character psychology save this novel from the fate of A World of Love. Though lacking in the power of her best work, The Little Girls is among the most impressive of Bowen's novels.

Initially asking what the consequences might be if a person rekindled relationships that have been dormant for fifty years, the novel provides one highly imaginative answer. Dinah Delacroix, still an attractive, active woman at sixty-one, decides to contact the two women with whom she was most intimate when they were all eleven and in their last term together at Saint Agatha's in the summer of 1914. By the end of part 1, Dinah (known as Dicey) has entertained at her country home Clare Burkin-Jones (Mumbo), divorcee and successful businesswoman, and Sheila Artworth (Sheikie), wife of a man whose family has long been prominent in Southstone, home of the now-vanished Saint Agatha's.

Part 2 moves back in time to deal with the closing weeks spent together by the threesome at school. The central activity follows the girls' decision to bury secretly in the school garden a coffer containing a note written in blood in a private code and various objects including a contribution by each girl known only to herself. Not until late in the novel is the nature of these contributions revealed. The section culminates with a term-end picnic and farewells, which endure until Dinah's notices in the personal columns of the Times and other English papers effect the reunion.

The action of part 3 follows from that of the opening sequence; Dinah talks her reluctant partners into digging up the coffer even though, as Sheila is in a position to point out, it now lies in the garden of a private home. The coffer is found empty, a discovery upsetting to Dinah. And more surprising is the collapse Dinah suffers two weeks later after being scolded by sturdy, no-nonsense Clare. The closing portion of the book revolves about the bed in which Dinah is prostrate. Sheila is on hand and in command of Dinah's two married sons; her handsome widower neighbor, Major Frank Wilkins; her youthful Maltese houseboy, Francis; and the now hangdog and troubled Clare.

Even this bare outline should reveal how the novel appears to shift in intent at the opening of the coffer. Seeming concern for the retrieval of both chest and friendship is displaced by the psychological mystery of Dinah's behavior and, retroactively, by the motivation underlying the apparent spontaneity of her decision to contact the past. The shift is, of course, seeming rather than real. Basically, the book is constructed on a cunning switch. Of the three women, Dinah appears to be the only one living a satisfying life. Why Clare and Sheila are reluctant to expose themselves to a woman whose advertisements bespeak an adventurousness they no longer possess is understandable. Yet events lead to a reversal in which Dinah emerges as the most troubled of the trio. Only gradually do we come to fathom, as Clare most evidently does, Dinah's problem and to comprehend what she means when she puzzles the others by saying such things as, “Can't you see what's happened? This us three. This going back, I mean. This began as a game, began as a game. Now—you see?—it's got me.”³ The reader can take some consolation initially that neither Clare nor Sheila “sees” either.

Dinah, it becomes apparent, has had an easy life, and she has become, as Clare points out to her, “in many ways very wonderful.” But, in summoning her old friends, she has encountered fears and doubts about the reality of her existence and the quality of its feeling. Though it is not crucial, it is not clear whether Dinah's doubts rose before or following the re-encounter. Dinah says, though after the fact, that she recalled her friends for hundreds of reasons (all of the facts of her life?), but Clare believes Dinah “chanced, not chose, to want Sheila and herself again” (276).

Quite appropriately, Dinah's crisis invokes for her memories of Macbeth and unstated echoes of life's “signifying nothing.” The whole affair of the coffer suddenly becomes a symbolic testing ground for her. When illumination finally comes to Clare, she says, over the slumbering body of Dinah, “There being nothing was what you were frightened of all the time, eh? Yes. Yes, it was terrible looking down into that empty box” (277). And Frank reported earlier that, when he and Francis had lifted the distraught woman into bed, she had cried, “It's all gone, was it ever there? No, never there. Nothing. No, no, no …” (258). Again it is not really clear whether Dinah is referring to her own life or to life in general, but from her point of view, the distinction hardly matters.

The first indication that Dinah is cracking occurs when the women return for drinks after their digging expedition to Artworths. Having hardly arrived, Dinah announces that she must leave. When Sheila tells her that her home “won't run away,” Dinah answers, “That's what it has done. … Everything has. Now it has, you see. Nothing's real any more …” (188). We may recollect with interest that, upon her introduction, Dinah is characterized as “a woman, intent on what she was doing to the point of trance …” (3). If, in the first stage of her awakening, Dinah must question the nature of her own reality, in the second stage, her personal being is called to an accounting. Taking umbrage at one of Dinah's remarks, Clare gives her an objective characterization of herself; she calls Dinah “Circe” and “a cheat. A player-about. Never once have you played fair, all along the line”; then she adds, “Some of us more than think we feel” (230).

This announcement amplifies earlier statements Clare and Sheila have made about Dinah. When Dinah's notices first came to their attention, and Clare and Sheila met to decide whether or not to answer her, they most readily recall Dinah as “too self-centered” (40). Throughout the book they refer to her as “Young Lochinvar” and “Ba-lamb.” And, after seeing the present-day Dinah, Sheila can still say she has “never yet outgrown being a selfish child” (201). When she becomes quite worked up over Dinah, she says, “What makes me so mad is the way things are showered on to her that she hasn't the sense to value or understand. Showered” (201). Moreover, the whole world built about Dinah attests to its unreality and its accommodation of her. Francis, with his Walter Mitty—like projections of secret-service adventure, is a fitting occupant of a demi-paradise in which his mistress has at her beck and call a handsome gentleman who helps her with tending a garden where innocence clearly prevails. The grotto with its fanciful collection of mementos pried loose from people, though they are items “which they couldn't have normally borne to part with,” and a place destined to confound future people is the perfect activity for an individual who enjoys, even if she does not comprehend, life.

In addition to the other names she calls Dinah, Clare claims she is an “enchantress's child,” and this term provides a clue for a reading of the wonderfully realized 1914 scenes. Dinah and her mother, Mrs. Piggott (pig it?),⁴ live in the cozy little Feverel Cottage (can we doubt the author's intent that we remember the raising of Richard in George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel?). Here, supported by a wealthy cousin, Mrs. Piggott indulges her two loves, fine china and books (later there is repeated reference to the books in Dinah's bedroom); here, “Mrs. Piggott and [Dinah] had … spun round themselves a tangible web, through whose transparency, layers deep, one glimpsed some fixed, perhaps haunted, other dimension” (85).

Though there are passing references to the visits of Major Birkin-Jones to Feverel Cottage, it is not until the end of part 2 that it is possible to comprehend his love for Dinah's mother. On the verge of reporting for active duty, for war is imminent, he appears at the picnic late to say farewell to Mrs. Piggott. She has been willing to take, if not to give; when she folds her arms and presses “them against herself” he says, “You're cold” (151). Later it is disclosed that Dinah's father threw himself under a train before her birth, and, although no explanation for his action is proffered, none seems needed. When Mrs. Piggott is sick in bed, Dinah wishes to quote a line from Macbeth and chooses, suggestively. “Was my father a traitor, mother?” (244). This question implies her recognition of what the loss of a father may have cost her life.

Technically, the novel's middle section is a tour de force in maintaining our attention on the surface action and implanting hints about Major Birkin-Jones in such a way that the disclosure of his love comes at once as surprise to us—and all the more so for having taken place under our very eyes.

Dinah's illness proves double-edged: for her it is purgative; for her circle of acquaintances it is rejuvenative. Frank is stunned. A selfish man himself, as Sheila observes, it is ironic that he is not aware that Dinah has fobbed him off, literally and figuratively, with a mask. But he does come to bury his head in her pillow. Sheila, hitherto somewhat ineffectual, finds a true outlet for her desire to be useful. Tending Dinah gives her an opportunity to repay her one-time exit from the deathroom of her lover, which has haunted her. By way of reward, she inherits, as it were in Dinah's offspring, the sons she has longed to have. For her part, Clare realizes how she has permitted business to dehumanize her and deny the feelings of others, for, standing over the prostrate Dinah, she says to herself: “I did not comfort you. Never have I comforted you. Forgive me” (277).

Clare's final admission of responsibility toward others is analogous with the change Dinah experiences. Fittingly, the book ends with Dinah waking from a long sleep. The brief exchange between herself and Clare reveals, for all its terseness, that Dinah has shed her childlike attitude to life, along with her terrifying sense of meaninglessness, and has assumed her proper role in the present. Upon awakening Dinah queries: “Who's there?” “Mumbo.” “Not Mumbo, Clare. Clare, where have you been?” (277). It is a paradox worthy of life that the innocence that came to trouble Dinah is the kind that made possible not only her own salvation but also the resurrection of her closest friends. This paradox recurs consistently in the author's fiction.

When we at last learn what items the girls placed in the coffer, it can be seen that each buried something really requisite to her life. If not in actuality, then metaphysically, events allow the women to repossess what was secretly hidden. Dinah's contribution was a gun, symbol of violence, without which, according to other Bowen novels, life is incomplete. The results of violence, if not the act itself, appear in the novel in the form of the bruise on Dinah's forehead, discovered when she is found by Francis slumped over. And, along with the late disclosure of Mr. Piggott's violent death, come several hints of contemplated suicide on Dinah's part.

Clare buried a copy of Shelley's poetry, believing herself through with it. Her failed marriage and her protective brittleness readily enough indicate her loss of a sense of poetry in life and her indifference to the humanitarianism Shelley advocated. Not so readily translatable as the gun and the book is Sheila's contribution to the casket of an extra toe she has had removed. But, when she mentions how embarrassed she was over the toe, it may be surmised that, in being unwilling to accept her fate or situation, her unwillingness to acknowledge the silver of flesh has remained as her inability to accept the events of her life, one that accounts for her tensions and hypersensitivity.

EVA TROUT

A World of Love and The Little Girls seek to justify the image of hope and promise that survive the Holocaust of The Heat of the Day. Both novels find rehabilitation possible in the modern world, but Elizabeth Bowen's tenth novel, Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes, discloses that the scene has indeed changed; the honeymoon is over. The world of Eva Trout is askew and romantically bloated; it is studded with heavy operatic names like Iseult, Eric, and Constantine. Fittingly a heroine with the sturdy, fundamental name of Eva Trout desires normalcy, but she, as the novel implies, is asking too much of our times. Long denied a sane, stable existence, Eva, on the verge of reaping her desires and of achieving respectable communication with the world, is struck down in a melodramatically bizarre and ludicrously contrived manner. Eva Trout is Bowen's contribution to the black humor of the 1960s. What makes this report tolerable is, typically enough with Bowen, the romping delight of the narrative voice that delights in the inexhaustibleness of the human condition, whatever its manifestations.

Mrs. Iseult Arbles, on her way to visit Eva, pauses in Broadstairs to visit the Charles Dickens's room in Bleak House. This room gives the narrator an opportunity to observe, “It took Dickens not to be eclipsed by Eva.”⁵ Eva, a “she-Cossack,” is the largest of the author's heroines, both literally and figuratively. But she shares with her predecessors an abnormal rearing that renders her conduct of relationships highly unnatural. A combination of miseducation or noneducation has made Eva a conversational misfit; as a result, drama follows from her encounters with communication. When is Eva to be believed, and to what extent? Conversely, how will she interpret or misinterpret the signals she receives from the abnormal or nervous human being surrounding her? A trout out of water in a neurotic world, Eva wants a husband and a child. But how to acquire them?

The book begins when Eva is boarding with Eric and Iseult Arbles who live on a fruit farm in Worcestershire. She is almost twenty-four, and when she has her birthday she is to come into a fortune. Chiefly she occupies herself with the local rectory children of Mr. and Mrs. Dancey. Her favorite is Henry, twelve, perhaps because “she [can] not boss him and he [can] mortify her …” (15). Quite evidently Eva is bored with her situation; and, like Bowen heroines before her, she is eager to begin her own life. The principal action of part 1 involves Eva's sudden and secretive departure for the Broadstairs area where she purchases a large furnished home near the sea. Life, presumably, begins with a home, preferably an older one that boasts a past bespeaking settlement. When she becomes wealthy, Eva fills this home with the latest in electrical equipment. The electric typewriter, stereo, movie projector, tape recorder, and computer (on order) are to place her abreast of her time and, perhaps, represent a reflexive determination to modernize her capacity to communicate.

After the house is to come what is more readily purchasable by Eva than a husband—a child. But Eva's nature does not permit her simply to fly to the United States where she intends to make this transaction; she must prepare the way. During a visit with Eva, Iseult proposes that Eva spend Christmas with the Arbles. Eva refuses on the grounds that she will, at that time, be having a baby. Unhindered by Eva, Iseult, realizing a time lapse of nine months between an earlier visit to Eva by Eric at Christmas, assumes the obvious.

Eva's announcement is her way of settling a grudge held against Iseult that dates from the days when Iseult was Miss Smith, teacher in a private girls' school, and Eva was one of her pupils. Eva arrived at the school after she had wearied of trailing about the world with her father and his male lover, Constantine, and had insisted that she be allowed to settle into a more natural life. Having passed through the hands of a series of indifferent governesses who served in place of her mother long since killed in a plane crash, Eva is elated to be recognized as existing by Miss Smith, and she experiences the first passion of her life: “Till Iseult came, no human being had ever turned upon Eva their full attention—an attention which could seem to be love. Eva knew nothing of love but that it existed—that, she should know, having looked on at it. Her existence had gone by under a shadow: the shadow of Willy Trout's total attachment to Constantine” (18). Like other Bowen characters who are charged with reciprocating the idealistic demands of other Bowen heroines, Iseult hedges in her response, and Eva conquers her caution as rejection. So the seed of antipathy comes to be planted.

When, a few years later, Willy Trout commits suicide and Constantine assumes the role of guardian, Eva decides she would like to board with the intellectual Iseult and her workingman husband on their fruit farm. The Arbles welcome Eva—but for financial reasons. Like Portia in The Death of the Heart, Eva enters a household where marriage is proving less than satisfactory: “the marriage was founded on a cerebral young woman's first physical passion” (19). Eric is disappointed because there are no children; Iseult, already chaffing at a restrictive life with a failed fruit farmer cum garage man, is troubled by his declining interest in her. Eric's eventual interest in Eva is not calculated to ease matters at all. Eva's pregnancy gambit proves to be the coup de grace to the marriage.

Not until eight years later does Eva learn that the Arble marriage failed to survive her implied relationship with Eric. However, this novel, and others by the author, shares an ambivalence toward violence wrought by the subjective innocent. There's no hint of loss, no sense of real pain over the Arbles' separation. Upon her return to England, Eva begins to pick up the ends of her earlier life. She finds Eric living contentedly with a common-law wife who has borne him two children. Iseult is located on the Continent but is easily enough lured back into Eva's orbit. Before long Iseult and Eric are back together again, and this time, seemingly, they are truly in love. No mention is made of the two children and their mother. Such is the modern world.

The baby boy Eva acquires surreptitiously in Chicago and christens Jeremy proves to be a deaf-mute, and, in the years of Eva's absence from England, she has lived in a series of American cities in an effort to find help for her son. When he is eight, she decides the time has come for them to return to her country and to locate, though such is never stated directly, a father for Jeremy. They settle in a London hotel, and, after Jeremy is set to sculpting with a private tutor, Eva leaves for Cambridge to seek Henry Dancey who is now a student.

The final sequence of absurdity has its beginning when Iseult, back from London, “borrows” Jeremy from his sculpting instructress in order to have a visit with him since she still assumes he has been fathered by Eric. When Jeremy fails to return to his mother at the hotel, she becomes distraught; her mind leaps immediately to the probability of kidnapping. Before she does anything drastic, however, Jeremy wanders in. He, of course, cannot explain matters to her. Unnerved, Eva decides to quit London for a time, and, leaving all of their possessions at the hotel, she and Jeremy make for Fontainebleau. While here, she fortuitously becomes acquainted with a doctor and his wife who have been working with deaf-mutes with considerable success. The couple agrees to accept Jeremy as long as he can live with them and Eva will absent herself. When Eva returns to England and Henry, she proposes marriage to the young man, who really is quite fond of her. He refuses. Then, as usual with Eva, who prefers to have the appearance of propriety if not the reality of it for the benefit of the Arbles and Constantine, she asks him to depart with her from Victoria Station as if he were going to marry her, and he agrees to her request.

Thus, the culminating scene takes place at Victoria. And indeed Iseult, Eric, and Constantine are on hand in a festive mood—as is Jeremy, who has been brought from France for the occasion. Before coming to the station, however, he has visited his old hotel to pick up some things left behind. He is delighted and surprised to find among the Trout goods a pistol, a real one, though he is not aware that it is. Bowen has earlier shown how the gun became so located. It belongs to Eric but turned up among Iseult's possessions when she went to the Continent. She has decided to bring it back to England in order to return it to him. Not wishing to carry the gun about with her, she is inspired, when she becomes aware of Eva's stored possessions in London, to deposit the gun temporarily with these.

There are two moments of drama at Victoria. First, Henry tells Eva that he has changed his mind; he really wishes to marry her. Second, Jeremy, rushing forward to greet his mother, playfully points the gun at her, pulls the trigger and the gun fires. Eva drops to the pavement dead, and the novel ends. Though the book invokes a Dickensian world as a context for Eva, it more fittingly reminds one of Thomas Hardy and of Jude the Obscure in particular. Eva, like Jude, has aspirations that both her limited awareness and her incessant misfortune abrogate.

The novel is very entertaining; Bowen is too much the professional for Eva Trout to be otherwise. But in retrospect, we wonder if it adds up to much. A residue of dissatisfaction seems almost inevitable. The author's work gives a sense of the untidiness and unpredictability of life, and her books realize her own insistence that major characters retain the capacity to unfold throughout a narrative. Eva Trout, conversely, is held too tightly in thrall by its basic narrative diagram. Eva, child of violence and seeker of a normal life, reverses the usual sequence of husband, child, house, and, when she is on the verge of attaining the husband, she comes full circle to her true inheritance of violence.

Eva Trout, in one sense an un-Bowen-like work, appears to be a send up of many of the author's recurring interests and fictional elements. This may account for the critical reservations it has prompted. Certainly it is a work asking to be read in its own grotesque terms as the numerous references to Dickens seemingly encourage. At bottom is the great Bowen theme of insecurity, and Eva Trout is either the final exorcising of a recurring nightmare or a bold attempt to laugh it out of court. Eva's lifelong handicapped pursuit of identity is by turns noble, ludicrous, and pathetic. As well, given the dislocations of the times, it is doomed. The fact remains that all human beings, even if fish out of water, must make their lives—if they are to live—by fashioning themselves. Elizabeth Bowen's last response to this, as Eva Trout demonstrates, is to somehow simultaneously laugh and cry.

Notes

1. William Heath, Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction to Her Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 120.

2. A World of Love (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 9; cited hereafter in the text by page number.

3. The Little Girls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 188, cited hereafter in the text by page number.

4. This allusion may seem less fanciful when it is noted that later in the novel Dinah says “in the voice of one continuing aloud a train of thought: ‘You huffed and you puffed and you blew my house down’” 244.

5. Eva Trout (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 133; cited hereafter in the text by page number.