SOURCE: Jordan, Heather Bryant. “Fictional Silences.” In How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, pp. 153-68. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Jordan explores Bowen's treatment of the psychological trauma of life during wartime in her postwar novel The Heat of the Day.]

War, if you come to think of it, hasn't started anything that wasn't already there.

—Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

The novel that emerged from Bowen's immersion in the Second World War epitomized “a state of living in which events assault the imagination.” In The Heat of the Day, Bowen depicts the psychological ramifications of the changed landscape of war, as she had in the short stories which were “unconscious sketches” for this novel.¹ This fiction shows her tackling in a more sustained, and sometimes more agonized, manner the same questions she had addressed in her wartime short stories: the nature of betrayal, changing conceptions of class, the role of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish, and the ramifications of espionage work. Indeed, the novel reflects Bowen's ambition, as she announced it to Sir William Rothenstein after he congratulated her on The Death of the Heart, to “write that immense novel everyone wants to write” in accordance with her conviction “that themes, in novels especially, should be large.”²

Montgomery's victory in Egypt, the Battle of El Alamein, and D day coincide with the important private moments of the novel. By juxtaposing each emotional turning point with a public one, Bowen realized her desire to write a “present-day historical novel” as she turned with “relief” to the larger world in “revulsion against psychological intricacies for their own sake.”³ This technique recalls the counterpointing she experimented with in The Last September where outside events endanger the internal lives of the characters. A world at war, in this later novel, invades and poisons the love affair between the central figures, Robert Kelway and Stella Rodney. Here, Bowen makes explicit her contention that “the relation of a man to society is an integral part of the concept of any novel.”⁴ In an article entitled “The Next Book,” appearing in the autumn 1948 issue of Now and Then, she discussed this tension between “the individual self-absorption and the individual's awareness of the outside world. … But the trouble is, how am I to find a scene, characters, or plot which will be the ideal vehicle for my memory?” (“On Writing” [“On Writing The Heat of the Day”], 12).

Although Bowen recounted that writing the book had been an enormous struggle, when she looked back on it she called it her best novel to date.⁵ While she had counseled, in her response to Cyril Connolly's questionnaire entitled “The Cost of Letters,” that a writer's work should improve through contact with others, in composing The Heat of the Day she explained that “the diversion of energy is a danger.”⁶ Yet, her literary friends appreciated her efforts and praised her intention to present “the peculiar psychological climate” of wartime.⁷ The novelist Elizabeth Taylor wrote to Bowen: “you rake up the dead leaves in our hearts and say many things which we did not know how to say ourselves—which we only very faintly perceived before.”⁸ Prone to hyperbole in the compliments she paid to Bowen's work, Rosamond Lehmann reported that she cried endlessly during her reading of the novel because of her close identification with Stella; for her the novel was “the unbearable recreation of war and London & our private lives and loves.”⁹ Charles Ritchie especially appreciated her distillation of the “hypnotic intensity of life in London” during the war years. On reflection he attributes her range of language to her wartime experience: “certainly the tension of those times brought all feeling closer to the surface and that seems to me to make her writing in The Heat of the Day and in her wartime short stories so markedly different from her books before and after.”¹⁰

Bowen's novel also spoke to a wide circle beyond her own acquaintance; after its publication in February, 1949, it sold forty-five thousand copies almost immediately.¹¹ Critics had expressed trepidation during the war that the novel, which “will create a picture which cannot be effaced by tomorrow's newspaper,” might not get written during time of war.¹² But The Heat of the Day, appearing after the conflict, answered these doubts by telling a story of war that people wanted to read. The wider canvas of the novel unifies London, the home counties, the south coast, and Ireland.¹³ Bowen's compulsion to make these disparate elements cohere linguistically accounts for some of the weakness apparent in her technical constructions as she channeled the intensity of her short stories into the “calmer, stricter, more orthodox demands” of the novel.¹⁴ By not allowing herself recourse to the world of the hallucinatory, she encountered even more obstacles to representing the “breaking down of immunity” she experienced in wartime (HD [The Heat of the Day], 93).

While the novels Bowen wrote before the war such as The Death of the Heart and Friends and Relations signal betrayal as “the end of the inner life” with attendant hurt and disappointment, in The Heat of the Day disloyalty could mean the end of a life.¹⁵ Transformed though the lens of the war, scenes from prewar novels seemed to Bowen to fade into a lost past; as she wrote her wartime novel, she contemplated the wreckage of the once “gleaming terraces” reduced to “giant shells.”¹⁶ An indication of the stress placed on her by the additional burden of her divided loyalties during the war surfaced in an interview she gave the Bell in 1942, the year she began writing The Heat of the Day in earnest. Then, she described her own “strong feelings of nationality” as being “highly disturbing.”¹⁷

As a result of Bowen's travel to Ireland on behalf of the Ministry of Information, conversations with Charles Ritchie about MI6, the British intelligence service, and her friendship with figures such as Goronwy Rees, she became more concerned with unmasking the meaning of loyalty and betrayal during a time of war.¹⁸ Hovering on the edge of a wartime world of traitors and spies, she must have known how near she was to the edge of this shadowy land. Her friend Rosamond Lehmann, for example, was aware that their mutual friend, Goronwy Rees, had been invited by Guy Burgess to be a Soviet agent.¹⁹ The critic Frank Kermode has speculated that Goronwy Rees as a young man might have been the model for the character of Eddy in The Death of the Heart.²⁰ Peter Quennell also believes Rees was the prototype for Eddy; apparently it was so successful a portrait that Rees threatened to sue Bowen after he read the book.²¹

Robert Kelway, whom Bowen referred to as “the problem character and the touchstone” of The Heat of the Day, spies on his own country and, thus, becomes its betrayer.²² Curiously, Bowen made him a fascist, and he is unconvincing in part because we hear so little from him directly. Troubled by the question of Robert's political allegiance, Lehmann wrote to Bowen to ask why she had not made him a “communist thus pro-Russia and an ally?”²³ Robert shows himself to be a national traitor who is attracted to the orderliness of Hitler's Germany, because there he hopes to find an answer to the emptiness in his own life. Obviously cognizant of Robert's opaqueness, Bowen had supplied her indirect answer to Lehmann's query in her interview with the Bell: “The idea for a book usually comes to me in the shape of an abstract pattern. … Then the job is to construct characters to fit the situation. Characters have a way of growing of their own accord which means a great deal of re-writing.”²⁴

The ambiguities of Robert's character center on Bowen's hesitation about the distinction between being a traitor and a spy. In the effort to separate these two concepts (a task of particular immediacy for her) she struggled to fashion Robert into an abstraction. By making him a construct rather than a personality, she violates her own advice and has him do what a character never should, that is, he says things “which fit into situations intellectually conceived beforehand.” As if to explain this irregularity, she declared after she had written The Heat of the Day that, in this book more than ever, the characters “took command” of her.²⁵ Robert's unevenness as a character reflects her own unsteady grasp of him (and echoes the perplexity of her own position in the employ of the Ministry of Information). He grows directly out of her Burkean investigation in Bowen's Court of the meaning of possession and heritage; she holds Robert's cold and empty English middle-class origins responsible for what some critics have called his “inability to conceive of his country emotionally.” This, she argues, leads to his embrace of fascism.²⁶

In Bowen's familiar blurring of the boundaries between politics and literature, Robert also suffers from his composite origins in fact and fiction. He is based, at least in part, on her lover Charles Ritchie, to whom she dedicated the novel.²⁷ He noted in a diary entry of January 20, 1942, that Bowen had told him she “would like to put me in her next novel.”²⁸ But, recognizing that it was difficult to place “real people” in fiction, she said in a letter to William Plomer, about his book Museum Pieces: “And you have accomplished what I had always taken to be impossible—the bringing of ‘real’ people into the dimension of fiction.”²⁹ An inherent contradiction, then, underlies her attitude toward the character who is at once the most despicable figure in the novel and a shadow of her own lover during wartime. During the course of the story, his complexity increases when he becomes a “mirror image” of the man who turns him in, Robert Harrison; significantly, both men share the name of Bowen's paternal grandfather.³⁰ Even near the end of her life Bowen was still trying to separate herself from this troubling character, Robert Kelway, with the untenable disclaimer that “no one of the characters in my novels has originated, as far as I know, in real life.”³¹

John Hayward describes the autumn of 1942, the year the novel begins, as a time when “spiritually we are going through a bad patch, having lived too long on hopes which have been frustrated and sick of words as a substitute for deeds.”³² “The glaring ordeal of that mid-war period” tests the characters of The Heat of the Day in their relationships to one another during the “lightless middle of the tunnel” that was the fall of 1942 (“On Writing,” 11).³³ The novel begins at an open-air concert in London's Regent's Park where Louie, a young woman whose husband is on duty with the army, meets Robert Harrison, who strikes her as odd. This counterspy is immediately made to appear suspect because he has neither an address nor an ascertainable past. An unpleasant, lugubrious figure, he begins the undoing of the love affair between Stella, a middle aged-divorcée who does “secret, exacting, not unimportant work” for a governmental bureaucracy, the Y.X.D., and Robert.

Harrison offers her a bargain—that she become sexually involved with him in exchange for his promise to protect Robert. Irreparably torn, Stella embarks upon an evasive life of deception. Her response to his dark threats—“your ‘we’ is my ‘they,’”—signifies her membership in the culture described in the novel where everyone must take a side, however unwillingly (HD 40). Stella's ordeal begins that evening when Harrison's emotional blackmail forces her to consider whether she has misjudged Robert's character. Not coincidentally, Harrison approaches Stella at a time when war has made her vulnerable. Stella registers her shock on his first visit through the distortion of her syntax: “Up his sleeve he had something.” During this meeting with Stella, Harrison, in a melodramatic but telling gesture, turns Robert's photograph to the wall. To Stella, in time, his eyes will become to her “black-blue, anarchical, foreign,” as they come to reflect markers of his flawed soul. After her son, Roderick, arrives at Stella's flat, the memory of her meeting with Harrison becomes one of an “imperfect silence, mere resistance to sound” (HD 15, 198, 56).

Stella first responds to Harrison's allegations against Robert by scanning her memory for glimpses of the fall of 1940 when they had met: “Never had any season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death.” She and Robert had begun their affair when he had come to London to work in the War Office after recovering from being wounded at Dunkirk. His leg never entirely healed, and his limp distinguishes him as a maimed man. But memories of the heroic excitement of earlier in the war had sustained the lovers through the tedium of 1942 when the Blitz had seemed “apocryphal, more far away than peace.” They take sustenance from a different era when the soil of the city “seemed to generate more strength” and the dahlia leaves “against the sun blazoned out the idea of the finest hour” (HD 90, 92, 91). Each one of their meetings in that season had appeared to be a piece of unbelievably good luck against the high odds of the threat of sudden death. Their memories reflect some of Bowen's own experience of the Blitz, as remembered by Charles Ritchie: “what is extraordinary is her stamina and courage in going on with her writing—after hours of duty in the air raid wardens' shelter and after the bombings of her house.”³⁴

As she absorbs Harrison's warnings, Stella decides to ground Robert in his personal history. Simultaneously hoping and fearing what she will discover in his past, she joins him on a dismal visit to the tasteless Gothic villa his family calls home. Harrison greets her on her return from the excursion, and he applauds her instincts: “Today you did exactly what I should have done in your place … went to look at the first place the rot could start.” Harrison has already guessed that Stella can never view Robert in the same light after the grim day she spends with his family, the Kelways. Appropriately, Holme Dene (meaning, literally, “Home of the Dane”) is hidden behind a prominently displayed sign reading Caution: Concealed Drive (HD 131, 105).³⁵ Its inhabitants—Robert's mother, sister, niece, and nephew—seem as faceless and unwelcoming as the house itself. Bowen selects details that display the meanness of life at this house, where at tea each person greedily contemplates his or her measly butter ration. The ugly neo-Gothic structure, built around 1900, the year of Stella's birth, becomes immediately suspect in the Bowen terrain where such architecture represents all that is dark and evil in the world.³⁶ Not only has “time clogged” the ticking of the grandfather clock, freezing the house's relationship to the past, but the very emotions that hang ineffably in the “blackly furnished” drawing room feel stagnant (HD 108, 107).

It becomes clear that Robert's family has long since ceased to care about conversing with one another. As Stella studies his mother (who goes by “Muttikins”), she realizes with horror that the woman's “lack of wish for communication showed in her contemptuous use of words.” Apparently, Robert has inherited his family's disregard for the currency of language. Like his mother who sits and stares out her windows at the “bewitched wood” surrounding her house, Robert has no conception of his own relationship to anyone or anything beyond himself, least of all his country. The Kelways give away their moral emptiness by speaking to one another “with difficulty, in the dead language” of a house filled with “repressions, doubts, fears, subterfuges, and fibs” (HD 109-10, 252, 256). Their words give only a small measure of the inadequacies implicit in their outlook on life. Robert's sister, Ernestine, remarks snidely, as Stella and Robert set out on their stroll, that “it took being shot in the leg to make Robert walk!” The children are not in any way immune to this vacancy; his niece and nephew are taught that England and Germany chiefly differ from one another because in Germany a guest would be forced to eat cake against his or her will. Stella, feeling “seedy” and “shady,” watches the awful assemblage as though she were looking down a “darkening telescope” (HD 107, 111).³⁷

Instead of maturing into a responsible adult under his family's roof, Robert came of age in a “man-eating house” with passages shaped liked “swastika-arms.” Treason, he explains to Stella on his last night alive, had offered promise for him because it “bred my father out of me, gave me a new heredity.” By being “born wounded,” he had proved all the more susceptible to the falsity and betrayal embodied in his origins in “a class without a middle, a race without a country. Unwhole. Never earthed in” (HD 258, 257, 273, 272). The novelist's use of the word race to describe a class distinction conveys yet another instance of her belief in the breakdown of society along social and economic lines.

For Stella, Robert cannot be true to his word because a “man of faith has always a son somewhere” (HD 175). He appears the prototype of the failings of the English middle class, “suspended in the middle of nothing,” meeting his death at the novel's climax, overcome by the denial of freedom and an inescapably paralyzing guilt. His guilt was inextricably entangled in his class; Bowen had avowed in a conversation with Charles Ritchie in October, 1941, that she saw guilt to be “specifically a middle-class complaint.”³⁸ Because the Kelways do not properly understand the obligations and rights of possession as Bowen (or Burke) set them out, they keep Holme Dene perpetually on the market. Robert justifies this curious state of affairs on the grounds that he can make a distinction between the desirable situation of having a house like Holme Dene for sale and the unseemly circumstance of trying to rent it (HD 121).

The rottenness of the Kelways is thus established as originating in their lack of ethical appreciation for the graceful responsibility of ownership.³⁹ The “betrayed garden,” overstuffed with a pergola, sundial, rock garden, dovecote, gnomes, and rusticated seats, horrifies Stella. Inside, features that are intended to appear antique are on closer inspection not even remotely authentic. Stella could not imagine who would want to buy the place. When, to their amazement, the Kelways do receive an offer on the house, they divide themselves into bitter camps. Robert, who never has seemed “to be living anywhere in particular,” votes to sell immediately, while Ernestine refuses to part with this monument to her past, however crippling it might be (HD 121, 298).

During their visit to Holme Dene Robert takes Stella to see his “boyhood's den” in the attic that has been carefully arranged, as though he “were dead.” The “sixty or seventy” photographs of Robert on display fascinate her. She sees a gallery of images of him, in tennis flannels, with his one-time fiancée, Decima (who perhaps decimated him), at school, and on vacation. Explaining why what he calls his “criminal record,” or “his own lies,” still hangs on the wall, he notes that his family “expect[s] me to be very fond of myself.” Stella stares at the portraits intently, much as she often studies Robert's photograph in her flat, hoping that she can fashion a composite from the disconnected fragments of Robert's past. Frustrated in her attempts, she exclaims, “this room feels empty!” Robert confesses that when he returns to the room he also senses the vacuum of his identity. He feels uncomfortable with his pose: “What I think must have happened to him [his father] I cannot while we're in this house, say” (HD 117, 118). The tortured arrangement of his words indicates Robert's vehemence at being brought to face his damaged past.

Thrust into the claustrophobic atmosphere of Holme Dene, Stella longingly recalls her Anglo-Irish origins, which, like Bowen's, are those of the “hybrid.” While she has once fantasized that she and Robert share the distinction of having come “loose” from their “moorings,” after she sees his family she realizes that, while her past “dissolved behind her,” his “was not to be denied” (HD 114, 115).⁴⁰ Only by summoning the memory of her heritage from “gentry till lately owning, still recollecting, land,” does Stella escape the “consecration of the inside” that so disturbs her at Holme Dene (HD 110, 115). She contrasts the “handsome derelict gateway” that leads to Mt. Morris, her family's Big House in Ireland, with the hidden drive of Holme Dene, which turns away strangers.⁴¹

The Heat of the Day recaptures Stella's birthright as an Anglo-Irish woman in its invocation of Mt. Morris as a place where the past can enlighten rather than defile the present. By establishing a moral hierarchy of ownership, as Bowen had in her autobiography, the novel arrives at a definition of the meaning and obligation of possession. The Big House again becomes a character in this book as its destiny becomes closely linked with that of Stella's son, Roderick, who is serving in the British army. Roderick, who was conceived at Mt. Morris while Stella was on her honeymoon with her then-husband Victor (who had been wounded in the First World War), literally owes his existence to the house. And, although the marriage has failed, it left its mark on Stella through Roderick: “The time of her marriage had been a time after war; her own desire to find herself in some embrace from life had been universal, at work in the world” (HD 133).⁴²

When Roderick's cousin Francis dies, he leaves Mt. Morris to Roderick, the son the Anglo-Irishman always wished to have. Just as in Bowen's Court, the issue of who will inherit the estate has been problematical. Since cousin Francis had no children (a fact which led to his wife's collapse), he has fastened on a favorite young relative, Roderick.⁴³ “Possessorship of Mount Morris affected Roderick strongly,” giving him “what might be called a historic future” so that the house becomes “the hub of his imaginary life” and the inheritance of Mt. Morris changes him inalterably (HD 50).

Bored by the routine of his service in the army, Roderick turns for imaginative and spiritual sustenance to Mt. Morris, where “by geographically standing outside war it appeared also to be standing outside the present” (HD 50).⁴⁴ Roderick spends much time wondering about the estate; his letters to his mother ask: How many acres are under tillage? Is there a gun room? What are its contents? (HD 202). By showing himself to be trustworthy and optimistic, he makes real a dream of successfully perpetuating the tradition of the Big House. The characters align themselves morally by their ability to appreciate Roderick's Irish inheritance: Roderick and Stella welcome the bequest, while Harrison and Robert do not.

Roderick, eager to understand his inheritance, is puzzled by an ambiguous phrase in Cousin Francis's will: “in the hope … that he may care in his own way to carry on the old tradition.” Stella warns him of what she has already discovered: “one must not be too much influenced by a dead person! After all, one must live how one can … and that often must mean disappointing the dead” (HD 72, 88). Roderick decides to follow his instincts about his responsibilities to the past by venturing to visit cousin Francis's widow at Wisteria Lodge in the British countryside. She has lived in this rest home for many years since suffering a breakdown over her inability to satisfy her husband's desire for an heir. Removed from the present, unaware of the war, she appears dazed and startled by the arrival of a young man in uniform. The nurses at the lodge warn the soldier not to upset her by discussing the past or the war, but it is the future that he wants to settle. And, in further pursuit of that hope, he obtains leave from the army so that he can become familiar with the Irish estate that is his “future.” He becomes more enthusiastic on his acquaintance with the place; he then determines that “Mt. Morris has got to be my living,” and he vows to set about the project scientifically and rationally: “One can't just go fluffing along as an amateur” (HD 313).

At the same time that the novel presents the possibility of reconciliation, rebirth, and continuity after the war—through an English soldier's inheritance of an Irish estate—The Heat of the Day also investigates the isolation implicit in neutrality.⁴⁵ Unlike the battered half-men who survive the First World War, Roderick can look to what lies ahead after his participation in this Second World War. Significantly, his prize rests outside the theater of war, in Ireland. Yet the characters have difficulty understanding the ramifications of war when they are in Ireland, a fact that is simultaneously positive and negative. Stella's fictional visit to Mt. Morris in November, 1942, coincides with the actual event of Field Marshal Montgomery's victory in Egypt when, as Harold Nicolson wrote, “the face of the war changed its entire expression.”⁴⁶ Later Stella recalls that moment of joy when she glimpsed the “mirage of utter victory” and also the annoyance she encountered at the indifference of the Irish caretaker's daughter to the miraculous news (HD 178).

The Heat of the Day portrays what Bowen regarded as certain excesses and deficiencies in the Anglo-Irish position on the war. Cousin Francis took his loyalty to England and his consequent disappointment with Eire's neutrality to extreme measures, even hoping for a “German invasion.” Before his death in May, 1942, he had prepared for this eventuality by digging tank traps in the avenues leading to Mt. Morris. Stella, who lives in England, sometimes displays insensitivity to the Irish attitude toward war. Her excitement at “being outside war” at Mt. Morris leads her to burn the caretakers' “light supplies for months ahead.” They are too polite to tell her that, thanks to her thoughtlessness, they will go to bed in the dark for most of the winter months. By contrast, when Stella returns from Ireland she suffers Ernestine's British callousness toward the state of affairs in the neutral country. In Stella's eyes the stolid sister displays her moral bankruptcy by asking sarcastically: “And how was the Emerald Isle? Beef steak? Plenty of eggs and bacon? … Over there, I suppose, no one realized a war was on?” (HD 183). Ernestine's spiteful questioning displays one facet of what Bowen perceived as a common British attitude toward Ireland.

Stella's idyll in Ireland, and her renewed appreciation of her heritage (in contrast to her day at Holme Dene), gives her the strength to challenge Robert with the news of Harrison's accusations. Stella suddenly realizes on her return from Ireland that her time away has further separated her from Robert; when he asks her to marry him on that first night back in London she succumbs to a distant watchfulness. Robert bursts out in anger and frustration: “We have not then been really alone together for the last two months. You're two months gone with this.” By comparing Stella's suspicions to the state of a woman pregnant with an unwanted child, Robert suggests the abortive future of their relationship. In Stella's last scene with him she maintains the metaphor in a reference to the flawed condition of their time as that of “a false pregnancy” (HD 191, 281).

The evening they endure after her trip to Ireland signals the onset of the final phase of their poisoned relationship. With the renewed confidence she has gathered from steeping herself in her ancestry, Stella allows herself to credit some truth to Harrison's accusations. The silence between Stella and Robert that she first noticed during her researches at Holme Dene grows increasingly intolerable. Their relationship, like the one between Lois and Gerald in The Last September, comes to stand for the long history of misunderstanding between Ireland and England which intensified and lengthened during the war. The fictional love affair deteriorates to resemble the state of relations between the two countries in the pre-treaty years when, as Bowen wrote, “each turned to the other a closed, harsh, distorted face” (BC [Bowen's Court] 452).

In The Heat of the Day Bowen fashioned Stella and Robert into agents who might assist her in settling some of the ambiguities that continually plagued her consciousness. Stella turns upon Harrison as the serpent who has caused her to feel like a spy on herself: “Somehow you've distorted love. You may not feel what it feels like to be a spy; I do—ever since you came to me with that story.” Stella suffers from the pangs of self-mistrust when she realizes that she is judging the man she thought she loved with a cold, objective eye. After she unequivocally accepts the fact of Robert's treason he answers her misgivings by hiding behind what he has learned so well from his family: “Don't you understand that all that language is dead currency?” (HD 142, 268).

Wearily, Robert describes the state of the world as he understands it: “There are no more countries left; nothing but names. What country have you and I outside this room: Exhausted shadows, dragging themselves out again to fight.” He has lost his humanity because all capacity for communication is gone, and even words like treason and country signify nothing to him: “words, words like that, yes—what a terrific dust they can still raise in a mind, yours even. … What they once meant is gone” (HD 267, 268). Because Robert no longer subscribes to the power of language, he has become enamored of treason. Thus, he represents an intense manifestation of a declaration that Woolf had made earlier in Three Guineas: “a word without meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.”⁴⁷

Unable to arrange his motives in a framework that Stella can accept, Robert rails against the war as “just so much bloody quibbling about some thing that's predecided itself,” saying “I want the cackle cut.” He reminds Stella that, unlike the First World War, the second one is “not a troubadours' war.” When he looks at the “laughing photographs” of her handsome uniformed brothers who were killed at Flanders he remarks, “they took what they had with them: they were the finish.” After Robert has left Stella's flat by way of the roof the language builds suspense by mirroring the emotional sequence the reader follows: “In the street below, not so much a step as the semi-stumble of someone after long-standing shifting his position could be, for the first time by her, heard” (HD 282, 276, 290).⁴⁸ After Stella's and Robert's charged conversation Robert jumps (or falls) to his death from the roof of Stella's flat in the same early morning hours of November [1942] that the Allies land in North Africa.⁴⁹ While the church bells peal in national celebration, Stella mourns his loss; she is finally forced to accept the consequences of his treason and her role in his demise.⁵⁰

The author's use of the passive voice in this scene typifies its obfuscating presence throughout the novel. Through such linguistic inversions Bowen re-created for her readers the torpor and convolutions of the war years when words strained to represent the significant connection between historical events and individual dramas.⁵¹ Daniel George, who read the novel for Cape, reported that the contorted language, the odd vocabulary, and the double negatives gave him trouble but he admired her efforts, saying that she had worked “miracles” by expressing “what's been ‘inexpressible.’”⁵²

Continually, Bowen's words recreated the tension between truth and belief that challenged her characters. She “put language to what for [her] was a totally new use,” investigating the “actual pattern” of the cracked “surface” of civilization so evident in wartime (“On Writing,” 11). The design she represented in The Heat of the Day was “a smashed-up” one “with its fragments invecting on one another.”⁵³ The language of the novel is alive with what is not said, what is inherently inexpressible in the human experience of war. The plot turns on omissions: first Robert's silences, followed by Harrison's, then Stella's. Paul Fussell associates this quality with the poets of the Second World War whose “silence ranging from the embarrassed to the sullen” runs throughout their verse.⁵⁴ The most important moral decisions taken in The Heat of the Day hinge upon the choice between silence and speech. The crux of the plot follows from the silence that ensues when words have been betrayers and have thereby lost their ability to signify.

Harrison visits Stella in London for the first time since Robert's death during the little Blitz of February, 1944, when she is sitting in her flat, “reading, listening to the guns.” Because his connection to Robert has “haunted” Stella, she is startled and, surprisingly, slightly relieved to see him; she even gets up the nerve to accuse him of having “killed Robert.” Yet she repeats what she has once told Roderick—that “one never goes back. One never is where one was.” And she tells Harrison of her future plans to marry a distant Anglo-Irish cousin, thus making a private peace between the past and the present. Harrison, on the other hand, appears to have made no firm decisions, a lapse he excuses by telling her that he specializes in “plans” rather than events. Against the backdrop of what Harrison calls “this dirty night,” her sterile relationship with him fades away, just as “the guns, made fools of, died out again” (HD 315, 321, 319).

This figure of apparent evil, Harrison, provides the hinge figure in the secondary plot of the novel that tells the story of two lower-class women, Louie and Connie. By means of this parallel plot involving the stories of two women from different social strata, Bowen investigates many of the same dilemmas that Robert and Stella had encountered. Although Connie and Louie initially seem very different from Stella, it soon becomes apparent that they share certain problems born of wartime. Bowen conveys dramatically how ancient social and economic distinctions were shrunk by the war, a phenomenon she had witnessed firsthand. In her only sustained portrayal of working-class characters who are not servants, Louie and Connie, “two diverse cases of the spiritual effects of social dislocation,” represent the various stresses many women faced in wartime when they found themselves alone.⁵⁵

While her husband, Tom, is abroad with the army Louie works in a factory. Although she dutifully lies to him in her letters, telling him that she looks at his picture every day, in her mind she sees the “face of a man already gone” (HD 158-59). Originally from the south coast, she has lost both her parents in a bomb blast early in the war. The more worldly-wise and cynical Connie, like Bowen, is an air raid warden. She befriends the guileless Louie and guides her through a newly found independence that daunts Louie. By giving a voice to characters outside her own province, Bowen lent authority, as she had in such stories as “In the Square,” to her abstract observation that “the war on Britain was undergone by all types.”⁵⁶

Louie and Connie's language reflects a certain “livingness” that Bowen had admired, so much in contrast to the ghostly voice of the maid in “Oh, Madam …”⁵⁷ Her declaration in her review of the 1936 Royal Academy show, that “art makes us sympathize with the lower orders by showing them in market places and pubs,” had been softened by a keener awareness of people, particularly women, beyond her usual circle.⁵⁸ The awkward dialect Bowen had created for Matchett, the servant in The Death of the Heart, has been replaced in The Heat of the Day by the more plausible voices of Connie and Louie. Connie never hesitates, for example, to expostulate against the stupidity of the general public who resent the air raid wardens for drawing pay in slow times: “the minute they stopped being pasted they became fresh” (HD 148).

The competent Connie anchors Louie, who is less surefooted. With her husband fighting in Egypt, Louie has been promiscuous, and a baby is due in the summer. Practical Connie, who appears “tough, cross, kind,” with a “scissor-like stride in dark blue official slacks,” sees no glamor in Louie's situation: “What do you think this makes you?—You're only one of many.” Louie has been out on nights when the war “brought out something provocative in the step of most modest women,” and she shares her predicament with many other women during this war (HD 147, 323, 145). All over Britain, illegitimacy and adultery increased.⁵⁹ This sexual pressure faced women of all classes; Stella has encountered her own ugly version of it from Harrison, but for many reasons she made different choices.

Because of Louie's friendship with Connie, the sheltered woman first begins to become a little more aware by reading the newspapers. She believes, as does Stella, that there is “much to be learned from the lessons of history,” so she diligently reads whatever she can find. Catchy phrases intended to keep the British fighting spirit alive are made for Louie, who takes considerable comfort from platitudes such as “war now made us one big family” (HD 155, 152). She also falls prey to the dangers of the same appeals by trying to mold herself into whatever role the newspaper advertises that day. In contrast, Connie, who before the war sold newspapers at a kiosk, reads newspapers like a “tiger for information.” She brusquely challenges the banalities Louie embraces but is wisely dubious about propagandist assertions that war could make anyone's character better.

Connie's differences with Louie about newspapers echo the larger conversation of the novel mourning the loss of the traditional linkage between the past and the future. Throughout the story Stella realizes that “the fateful course of her own fatalistic century seemed more and more her own.” The apprehension of this truth accounts for the urgency of the historical debate among the characters of The Heat of the Day (especially Stella and Robert), who “are undergoing the test of their middle years” in the “testing extremes of their noonday”—that of the century, and that of the war (HD 134; “On Writing,” 11). Stella, Connie, and Louie are all trying to apprehend their relevance to one another as well as to their ever-changing situations.

Initially, Connie's greater knowledge and competence overwhelm Louie. Over the course of their friendship, however, Louie's admiration “shift[ed] its ground: Decidedly Connie qualified by her nerve to be a saviour of the human race; at the same time she had a tongue like a file, so that you could not take her to be the race's lover” (HD 148). The novel displays Louie to be the more sympathetic character; Connie's misplaced moral zeal compels her to write a meddling missive to inform Tom of his wife's pregnancy. Before she can put the letter in the mail a telegram arrives, announcing Tom's death in action. Spared from confessing the truth, Louie decides to move back to the south coast with her newborn son. There, she will maintain the fiction of her son's paternity.⁶⁰ Her choice is set against the backdrop of the opening of the war's second front, which seemed like “a hallucination—something like the second coming or The End of The World.”⁶¹ In returning to the south coast, Louie fulfills Bowen's dreamlike vision of it as a place where differing classes could meet and attain harmony. If not in life, then in art, she could resurrect the resolution that landscape had once brought.

Comforting his mother after Robert's death, Roderick invokes creation as “the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting” (HD 300). The end of The Heat of the Day recalls the narrator in The Death of the Heart, who described art as the “emotion to which we remain faithful, after all” (DH [The Death of the Heart] 95). Bowen numbered herself among the creative writers, who were “the guardians and spokesmen of human values.” Embracing fidelity to language as the means to shared experience, she increasingly emphasized her view of loyalty as the quality “essential to survival.”⁶² Characters like Robert, who cannot believe in truth or the power of language to convey it, kill themselves.

Bowen returns to another familiar image from her prewar novel, The Death of the Heart, as she closes The Heat of the Day. Just before Portia Quayne departs for the south coast on a holiday, she sees Yeatsian swans on the lake in Regent's Park, “folded, dark-white cyphers on the white water in an immortal dream” (DH 130).⁶³ The swans still suggest artistic expression in this later novel, but they have acquired a public and historical significance beyond that of the private symbol. As Louie walks her baby, the young Tom, in Seale-on-Sea, she looks up at the sky and sees swans flying overhead. At that moment her internal vision merges with that of the birds' flight westward, as they follow the “homecoming bombers” (HD 329).⁶⁴

With this scene Bowen shows herself closer to a resolution about the war. Despite the expanse of the Second World War and its extinction of so much that mattered to Bowen, the paradox of her postwar novel about wartime lies in the hopeful moments she managed to interlace with its tragedies. In memorializing the psychological struggles of this conflict through art, Bowen remained somewhat optimistic. Presumably, Roderick will go on to refurbish Mt. Morris, Stella will contentedly marry a member of her race, and Louie will devote herself to bringing up a fine young son who may better the future.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Bowen, quoted in V. S. Pritchett, “Elizabeth Bowen,” 350; “On Writing The Heat of the Day,” Now and Then 77 (Autumn 1949): 11.

2. Bowen to Sir William Rothenstein (June 27, 1939), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

3. Elizabeth Bowen, “Material for Broadsheet” (n.d., but presumably published just after The Shelbourne Hotel), HRHRC. For an analysis of the connection between public and private in The Heat of the Day, see Edwin J. Kenney, Jr., Elizabeth Bowen (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 74.

4. Elizabeth Bowen, English Novelists (Glasgow: William Collins, 1942), 14. See also Dominique Gauthier: “precarité de cet équilibre [between society and man] exacerbée par le climat de la guerre” (L'image du réel dans les romans d'Elizabeth Bowen [Paris: Dider Erudidian, 1985], 108).

5. Bowen, “Miss Bowen on Miss Bowen,” 33.

6. Elizabeth Bowen, “The Cost of Letters,” in Ideas and Places, ed. Cyril Connolly (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), 83.

7. Bowen, “Autobiographical Note” (October 11, 1948), HRHRC.

8. Elizabeth Taylor to Elizabeth Bowen (February 24, 1949), HRHRC. In “The Future of the Novel,” Rosamond Lehmann wrote that “the war proved that people's private lives do very much go on, with an inner intensity to match the external violence” (Britain Today 109 [June, 1946], 8).

9. Rosamond Lehmann to Elizabeth Bowen (March 4, 1949), 1; (February 14, 1949), 4, HRHRC.

10. Charles Ritchie to the author (April 18, 1988).

11. Michael Howard, Jonathan Cape, Publisher (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 240. See J. B. Priestley, Literature and Modern Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 370. For a further discussion of the relation between the war and the novel, see P. H. Newby, The Novel, 1945-1950 (London: Longmans, 1951). In The Novel Now (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967) Anthony Burgess argued that “comparatively few good novels” resulted from the Second World War because the war “only stimulated the desire to keep records” (48). See also Alan Munton, English Fiction of the Second World War (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

12. See “Why Not War Writers” (manifesto signed by Arthur Calder-Marshall, Cyril Connolly, Bonamy Dobrée, Tom Harrisson, Arthur Koestler, Alun Lewis, George Orwell, and Stephen Spender), Horizon 4 (October, 1941): 236-39.

13. See Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, for an excellent discussion of The Heat of the Day. She notes that Bowen connects the personal and the historical through “loaded imagery, with which the novel is as tense as any short story” (181). See also Walter Allen's review of The Heat of the Day where he argues that Bowen exhibits “the unity of method and single-mindedness of purpose which hitherto she has maintained only in short stories” (New Statesman, February 26, 1949, 208).

14. Bowen, “Stories by Elizabeth Bowen,” in Seven Winters, 181.

15. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart, 320. Lee sees the “idea of a civilization that has earned, and deserves, its own destruction” as central to The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen, 157).

16. Elizabeth Bowen to William Plomer (Thursday [194-]), Durham University Library.

17. Bowen, “Meet Elizabeth Bowen,” 425.

18. See Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, 152.

19. Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 155. I disagree with Lee, who believes that The Heat of the Day portrays “a woman's view of the male ‘Intelligence’ world” (Elizabeth Bowen, 175).

20. Frank Kermode, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 80.

21. Peter Quennell, Customs and Characters: Contemporary Portraits, 9.

22. Elizabeth Bowen to Charles Ritchie, quoted in Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, 149.

23. Lehmann to Bowen (March 4, 1949), 2, HRHRC. Other critics have described a similar difficulty with him. P. H. Newby in The Novel, 1945-1950 writes, “It is hard to believe in him or the form which his treason takes” (20). In the words of L. P. Hartley, he is “a force rather than a human being.” He wondered if Bowen ever fully explained the important distinction between “passive and active disloyalty” (review of The Heat of the Day, Time and Tide 30 [March, 1949]: 230, 229). Elizabeth Hardwick in “Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction” questioned why Bowen had not made Robert anti-Semitic, concluding that she was “too cautious” to mention the topic. The book as a whole was disappointing to her: “as a political novel, or a commentary on the English middle class, or a character novel, except for the engaging treatment of Stella Rodney, it is too impalpable to be held in the mind” (Partisan Review 16 [November, 1949], 1118).

24. Bowen, “Meet Elizabeth Bowen,” 423-24.

25. Bowen, quoted in Charles Ritchie (March 3, 1942), Siren Years, 137; “Miss Bowen on Miss Bowen,” 33.

26. Benedict Kiely, Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique (Dublin: Golden Eagle, 1950), 152-53. He identifies Robert's parallels with the character of Lois in The Last September, who can only appreciate her country on an intellectual basis.

27. In her “Autobiographical Note,” Bowen wrote that at one point she thought of dedicating The Heat of the Day to her Irish housekeeper at Clarence Terrace, who played a crucial role in the completion of the book—“but for her it could never have been written” (5).

28. Ritchie, Siren Years, 132.

29. Bowen to Plomer (September 9, 1952), Durham University Library.

30. Allan E. Austin, Elizabeth Bowen, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 54.

31. Elizabeth Bowen, “People,” in Pictures and Conversations, 58.

32. John Hayward to Frank Morley (September 7, 1942), King's College Library, Cambridge.

33. Bowen, Heat of the Day, 93, 26. Hereafter this edition will be referred to in the text as HD.

34. Ritchie to the author (April 18, 1988).

35. Harriet Blodgett, Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bowen's Novels (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 160-63.

36. See Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, for a further discussion of the Gothic style in Bowen's fiction (178-79). John Hildebilde also notes that in Bowen's work: “any house built after 1900 is more than likely not quite up to the mark” (Five Irish Writers, 108).

37. Bowen's depiction of Robert has the vehemence of her “Yeatsian hatred of the middle class.” See F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939, 78.

38. Ritchie, Siren Years, 120.

39. John Atkins attributes the divorce of house and owner in The Heat of the Day to the war (Six Novelists Look at Society [London: Calder, 1977], 50).

40. Edward Stokes places the “ex-gentry” in The Heat of the Day on “the side of the angels” (“Elizabeth Bowen—Pre-Assumptions or Moral Angle?” Journal of Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 11 [September, 1959]: 45).

41. In Happy Rural Seat, Richard Gill discusses the “spiritual crisis” that Bowen develops between Holme Dene and Mt. Morris (187). He also argues that Bowen's understanding of the Big House as a “symbol of community” was strengthened by writing Bowen's Court and The Heat of the Day (57-58).

42. See John Coates's discussion of Victor as a World War I veteran in “The Rewards and Problems of Rootedness in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day” (Renascence 39 [Summer 1987]: 488- 90).

43. Note that in To the North Bowen named a dog Roderick (169).

44. William Heath identifies useful distinctions in the way in which Bowen presents war in The Last September and The Heat of the Day. He views Bowen's portrayal of the “war in Ireland, like the one outside Troy, as an apathetic, mythical one” in the earlier novel, whereas in The Heat of the Day World War II “threatens integrity and attacks the individual's heart” (Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction to Her Novels [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961], 118).

45. Antoinette Quinn discusses the “symbolic healing” that the plot of The Heat of the Day projects—that is, “that an English soldier can inherit the big house” (Elizabeth Bowen's Irish Stories, 320).

46. Nicolson, Letters and Diaries, vol. 2, 252.

47. Woolf, Three Guineas, 184.

48. Jocelyn Brooke argues that the very “thinness” of the language gives “the effect of some neurotic impediment, a kind of stammer” (Elizabeth Bowen [London: Longmans, Green, for the British Council, 1952], 26). See also Barbara Bellow Watson, who observes that “Bowen has devised a form capable of enclosing grotesque aberration within an extraordinarily realistic narrative” (“Variations on an Enigma: Elizabeth Bowen's War Novel,” Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1987], 82).

49. For a discussion of Robert's death in the novel, see Angela G. Dorenkamp, “Fall or Leap: Bowen's The Heat of the Day,” Critique 10 (1968): 13-21.

50. For an analysis of Stella as Bowen's “most vivid character,” see Vida Marković, The Changing Face: Disintegration of Personality in the Twentieth-Century British Novel, 1900-1945 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 113.

51. Critics have both applauded and been disturbed by Bowen's unorthodox decisions, which startled particularly those readers who had come to expect quiet, domestic fiction from Bowen. John McCormick attacked the novel as one of the least successful novels of wartime by commenting that, “it is as though someone had moved a Jamesian interior into a windswept field” (Catastrophe and Imagination [London: Longmans, Green, 1957], 229). Walter Sullivan decided that the novel involved Bowen in what she was least suited for: “discussion of ideologies, questions of political right and wrong” (“A Sense of Place: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of the Heart,” Sewanee Review 84 [1976]: 148). In his review of The Heat of the Day Brendan Gill wrote that Bowen “has taken a big, if unsteady, step forward … as an artist she is risking more than she has ever risked before”; her vision was “wider and deeper than it has ever been before” (New Yorker, February 19, 1949, 88-89). Lee determines that the novel is not Bowen's best; it is “highly strained, and there is evidence of a struggle” in the mannerisms of “double-negatives, inversions, the breaking up of the natural sentence order, [and] passive constructions” (Elizabeth Bowen, 164-65).

52. Daniel George, Reader's report on The Heat of the Day, quoted in Howard, Jonathan Cape, 181.

53. Elizabeth Bowen, “Elizabeth Bowen and Jocelyn Brooke,” BBC broadcast, (October 3, 1950), 11, 12, HRHRC.

54. Paul Fussell, “Killing, in Verse and Prose,” in Thank God for the Atom Bomb, 131.

55. Coates, “Rewards and Problems of Rootedness,” 484.

56. Elizabeth Bowen, review of The People's War, by Angus Calder (1969), reprinted in The Mulberry Tree, 182. Penny Summerfield argues that “social mixing among women war workers … has been exaggerated” (“The Levelling of Class,” in War and Social Change, ed. Harold L. Smith, 194).

57. Elizabeth Bowen, “Advice” (1960), reprinted in Seven Winters, 89.

58. Elizabeth Bowen, review of “Royal Academy” (1936), reprinted in Collected Impressions, 210.

59. In fact, “illegitimacy rose from 4.4 per cent of all live births in 1939 to 9.1 per cent in 1945, the main change being that fewer extramarital conceptions were legitimated by marriage than before, and there was a four-fold increase in the number of divorce petitions filed for adultery between 1939 and 1945.” See Penny Summerfield, “Women, War and Social Change: Women in Britain in World War I,” 111.

60. The birth of her baby was not an isolated occurrence; in fact nearly 880,000 births were reported in the British Isles in 1944. See Longmate, How We Lived Then, 167.

61. Ritchie, Siren Years, 166.

62. Elizabeth Bowen, “Disloyalties” (1950), reprinted in Seven Winters, 64.

63. Dorenkamp discusses the swans as a symbol of art in the context of Bowen's view of the Second World War as a “failure of art” (“Fall or Leap,” 20). See Coates, “Rewards and Problems of Rootedness,” on this recurrence (501).

64. In ending her novel with the crescendo of D day, Bowen makes clear her belief in the haunting effects of the “apocalyptic” nature of the war and its indelible and recurring imprint on modern consciousness. See Watson, “Variations on Enigma,” 131-51.