SOURCE: Lee, Hermione. “The Bend Back: A World of Love (1955), The Little Girls (1964) and Eva Trout (1968).” In Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, pp. 189-212. London: Vision Press, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Lee examines Bowen's final series of novels—A World of Love, The Little Girls, and Eva Trout—maintaining that all three deal with the sense of uncertainty and detachment from emotional life that Bowen finds characteristic in post-World War II society.]

What fails in the air of our present-day that we cannot breathe it?

The ‘awful illumination’ of war confirmed, on a vast scale, Elizabeth Bowen's personal vision of a denatured and dispossessed civilisation. ‘There's been a stop in our senses and in our faculties that's made everything around us so much dead matter.’ ‘How are we to live without natures? … So much flowed through people; so little flows through us … All we can do is imitate love or sorrow.’ These characteristic utterances (from ‘Summer Night’ and ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’) are spoken out of limbo, by people disinherited from a past rich in emotions and certainties, and prisoners to a future which requires ‘genius’ to be lived in at all. The paradigmatic voice of her war-time writing might be that of the young soldier in her radio play of 1946 about Trollope, who dreams on a railway journey, that he is speaking to Trollope and explaining to him his love of the novels:

We're homesick for anything right-and-tight … The whole way of life that is quite, apparently, gone … I think your novels are a support against the sort of hopelessness we're inclined to feel … It's essential for us, these days, to believe in people, and in their power to live … we long for what's ordinary.¹

Elizabeth Bowen's post-war writing deals more than ever with the failure of feeling and certainty in modern civilization, and with the need for consolatory retreats into memory and fantasy. The last three novels reiterate a distaste for contemporaneity: ‘Her time, called hers because she was required to live in it and had no other, was in bad odour, and no wonder … too much had been going on for too long.’² ‘Nothing's real any more … There's a tremendous market for prefabricated feelings.’³ ‘What becomes of anyone's nature?’⁴ In her writing about contemporary fiction she finds ‘an increasing discrepancy between facts, or circumstances, and feeling, or the romantic will’⁵, an increasing compulsion to retreat from the nullity of modern life into ‘the better days’:

Now, after a second war, with its excoriations, grinding impersonality, obliteration of so many tracks and landmarks, heart and imagination once more demand to be satisfied … Can this demand be met only by recourse to life in the past? It at present seems so.

… What fails in the air of our present-day that we cannot breathe it? Why cannot the confidence in living, the engagement with living, the prepossession with living be re-won?⁶

Just as the war answered to Elizabeth Bowen's conception of her civilization, so the conditions of the post-war life in the West seemed to her to confirm her diagnosis. The three novels she wrote in the Fifties and Sixties are about displacement, alienation and the search for consolation. They ‘bend back’—into her own past, in that they return to pre-war Ireland and to schooldays in Kent, and into the characters' past, in that two of the three novels describe attempts to summon up lost time. The last novel is set in the present, but its characters are at a loss in an alien world.

In their emphasis on dislocation, on the discrepancy between ‘fact, or circumstances, and feeling, or the romantic will’, the last novels confirm her lifelong attitudes to existence. More privately, they arise from the rather unhappy circumstances of Elizabeth Bowen's old age. A World of Love was begun in Ireland after the death of Alan Cameron, and the shabbiness of its Irish house reflects, as Victoria Glendinning suggests, her ‘own predicament at Bowen's Court’⁷. After the sale and demolition of Bowen's Court she continued to go to Ireland, most often as the guest of the Vernons at Kinsale, and since the early Fifties she had been spending a good deal of time in America, and in Rome (visits which resulted in a fanciful and indulgent travelbook, A Time in Rome). But she had no home. Her attempts to settle down in England took the form of journeys back into her past. She first took a flat in Headington, in a house belonging to Isaiah Berlin, and then, in 1965, bought a house in Hythe. In her sixties she developed lung cancer.

The biography insists that Elizabeth Bowen put a brave face on her circumstances and was active, busy and sociable until the last possible moment. The last two novels, however, communicate a painful sense of uncertainty, even of disequilibrium. Evidently there were personal reasons for this, but the unsatisfactoriness of the later work also has literary grounds. Elizabeth Bowen's fiction in the 1930s and '40s resulted from a fruitful conjunction between her historical attitudes, her literary manner and her sense of a society. After the war her attitudes to that society seemed to be confirmed, but her literary manner was losing its usefulness. The last two novels in particular express unease not merely in their subject-matter but also in an uncertainty of tone. And though A World of Love, her only novel of the Fifties, is more like the earlier books and has some attractive atmospheric qualities, it works an outworn vein. With Friends and Relations, it is the most mannered of her novels, and, unlike The Death of the Heart or The House in Paris, it is sentimental about youthful innocence.

After A World of Love she felt the need to turn herself into a different kind of novelist. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's reaction against The Waves, and her attempt to find a method which would make The Years into an appropriate fictional document for the Thirties. Elizabeth Bowen, likewise, wanted to come to terms with the Sixties. There's an illuminating reference in the biography to the influence of Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark on The Little Girls, particularly for their interest in ‘nightmare and fantasy’⁸, and to Elizabeth Bowen's plan to write this novel ‘externally’, without revealing her characters' thoughts and feelings.⁹ These are symptoms of a predicament. She was a novelist who had begun to write under the shadow of Forster and Virginia Woolf, whose affinities, in manner and subject, were with L. P. Hartley, Henry Green, Rosamond Lehmann and early Greene, and who found herself in the Sixties at odds with her own methods. As her interest in the unconscious and the abnormal increased (the last two novels are concerned with involuntary recall, nonverbal communication, retardation, infantilism and fantasy life), so the controlled Jamesian analysis of motive and emotion began to seem inappropriate. As her environment became increasingly inimical to her, so the intense, nostalgic evocation of place at which she excelled, was put at risk. The last two novels are trying for a new kind of fictional language and method, but they succeed only in conveying qualms about the novel form itself. In the context of English fiction of the Sixties they lack the solidity of the realists, and the wit and density of the ‘fabulists’ who most influenced her.

All three of the late novels are preoccupied with time and recollection. They make similar references to déjà vu and to the overlap between memory and fantasy: ‘Were there not those who said that everything has already happened, and that one's lookings-forward are really memories?’¹⁰ ‘They say—don't they?—one never is doing anything for the first time.’¹¹ ‘Imagining oneself to be remembering, more often than not one is imagining: Proust say so. (Or is it, imagining oneself to be imagining, one is remembering?)’¹² In the last two books retrospection is confused: there's some uncertainty as to what actually has happened. A World of Love, however, is poignant and idyllic in its pursuit of the past. As the extravagant title implies (taken from Traherne's ‘There is in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be’), it is a romance of feelings and personal relations, in retreat from the wider political reverberations of The Heat of the Day. It is also as close to being a ghost story as her novels were ever allowed to come—and might, perhaps, have worked better as a long short story in the manner of ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, with which it has affinities.

From the start of the novel—County Cork, the sun rising (‘on the heat of the day before’) for an exceptionally hot June day, an ‘expectant, empty, intense’ landscape, a dilapidated house, Montefort, ‘somewhat surprisingly’ fronted by an obelisk, a beautiful girl of twenty in a ‘trailing Edwardian muslin dress’ coming out to read a letter—the atmosphere is so characteristic as to be almost self-parodic. Like ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, the novel initially gives the impression of being set in the past. And, like that story, it cuts roughly and abruptly to the squalid modern litter of a bedroom inside the house: ‘a packet of Gold Flake, a Bible, a glass with dregs, matches, sunglasses, sleeping pills, a nail file and a candlestick caked with wax into which the finished wick had subsided.’ Evidently Montefort's hand-to-mouth condition in the Fifties is to be contrasted with the past and the rapt romanticism of the girl reading the letter is to be matched against the disabused toughness of the woman asleep in the bedroom. Characters, setting and plot are thoroughly Bowenesque. For all its flaws, A World of Love is a touching novel, in being, as it transpired, a farewell to the Irish subject and to many of her familiar materials.

Like Henrietta and Leopold uncovering the past of the house in Paris, Jane Danby's find of a bundle of letters in the trunk with the dress unlocks the past of Montefort. As with the two children in the earlier novel, her chance discovery not only raises ghosts but liberates her into her own future. The story of the sleeping princess, as in other works, is invoked, but in this case the heroine is not awakened for a tragic shock or disillusionment, like Lois, Emmeline, or Portia. A World of Love is the most benign of the novels.

But, like The House in Paris, it does contain an unhappy past, which has produced the uneasy circumstances of the life at Montefort. Antonia, the woman in the bedroom, has been the owner of the house since her cousin, Guy, (the writer of the letters) died in the war in 1918. At his death, Guy was engaged to an English girl, Lilia, then a beautiful and bewildered seventeen-year-old. Antonia took charge of Lilia's life, to the extent of marrying her off at thirty to another cousin, the ‘wild’, illegitimate Fred Danby, and of installing the couple at Montefort. There, the marriage worked itself out through stages of passion and coldness, two children were born, Jane and her eccentric younger sister, Maud, and the Danbys' ill-defined status as ‘caretakers’, farmers and hosts to Antonia continued for twenty-one years, due to the reluctance to ‘sitting down and having anything out’. Lilia's brooding dislike of Montefort and of Antonia, Fred's dotage on his elder daughter, the estrangement of husband and wife, and Antonia's nerve-racked impatience with the whole set-up are ignited by Jane's discovery of Guy's letters. Thirty or more years on, he seems to return, as the letters fall into the hands of every member of the household. Jane falls in love with her idea of him; the emotion translates her from a girl to a woman. Spotted as a rising beauty by the neighbouring châtelaine, ‘Lady Latterly’, at the local fête, she goes to a dinner-party at the castle—a comic setting which the ghostly presence of Guy (who must often have dined there with the past owners) transforms into a bridal feast. Jane moves into Lady Latterly's orbit, and is driven by the castle chauffeur to Shannon airport, to meet one of Lady Latterly's guests—and cast-off boyfriends—Richard Priam. The time is right, the letters have prepared the ground: ‘They no sooner looked but they loved.’

This romantic movement is counterpointed, with characteristic wryness, by the antic ‘possession’ of Maud, struggling with her ‘familiar’, laying curses on her family, and racing to the radio to listen to the strokes of Big Ben, and by the disconcerting effect of the letters on the older generation, now (like Elizabeth Bowen) in their fifties. Antonia's painful love of Guy, Fred and Lilia's jealousy and bitterness are re-enacted; all are haunted by the writer of the letters, who, it transpires, has been unfaithful to both women. But, unlike The House in Paris and To the North, and like The Death of the Heart, this is a novel of compromise, not of tragedy. Lilia and Fred move towards a more companionable relationship, Antonia belatedly accepts Guy's love for Lilia and her own necessary bond with her. Though ‘one was never quite quit of what one has done’, by the end of the novel the ghost has been exorcised, and ‘the future was the thing’.

If A World of Love is arrived at after the earlier works, its ghostliness can be seen to arise partly from the self-referential echoes. These don't merely consist of general resemblances—to the structure of the past breaking in on the present, as in The House in Paris or ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, to the pattern of relationships in The Death of the Heart (Antonia and Jane mildly re-enact the hostilities between Anna and Portia), or to the subject of The Last September, a young girl waiting for something to happen in an Irish house. There are more specific allusions. Maud is a compound of Elizabeth Bowen's most horrible small girls. Lilia remembering her farewell to Guy at the railway station, where she overheard him speaking intimately to Antonia, calls up a scene very like the embrace between Karen and Max on the train at Victoria. What Lilia hears Guy saying is ‘You'll never see the last of me!’ The words recall the parting of the soldier in ‘The Demon Lover’: ‘I shall be with you,’ he said, ‘sooner or later. You won't forget that. You need do nothing but wait.’¹³ Jane's visit to Lady Latterly's castle is like Marianne's excursion with Davina in ‘The Disinherited’. Like Marianne, Jane moves in a rapt, ethereal trance through the ‘void, stale, trite and denying drawing-room’; like the Thirties socialites in ‘The Disinherited’, Lady Latterly's English guests are ghostlike: there was ‘something phantasmagoric about this circle of the displaced rich’. A World of Love is haunted by its author's past creations, and most of all by the earlier books and stories about Anglo-Ireland.

When A World of Love is set against the Anglo-Irish novel of 1929, its shadowiness is apparent. Although The Last September was set back in the time of the Troubles, and although the courtship of Lois and Gerald was romantically treated, the early novel was much more full-blooded than A World of Love. Lois was, after all, in love with a real soldier, and not the ghost of one. Anglo-Irish society, though diminished, was still felt to possess energy and decorum; and the individual lives were inextricably related to the political situation. In A World of Love the girl is in love with a phantom, there is no Anglo-Irish society, and the lives at Montefort and at the castle, lives of demeaning poverty or demeaning wealth, exist in a vacuum. For all that the novel describes a dreamy prelude to adult love, its real subject is loss. This is the last, faint, spectral chapter in the history of Anglo-Ireland.

Thus the novel's successes are not the romantic set-pieces—Jane sensing Guy's presence opposite her at the castle dinner-party, Antonia and Lilia pursuing their memories of Guy—but its wry accounts of what has become of the Anglo-Irish and their homes. The English Lady Latterly, of dubious past, who's bought up ‘an unusually banal Irish castle, long empty owing to disrepair’ is part of an influx of nouveau riche moving in on a landscape once ‘vigilant’ against newcomers, and scattered with ‘eyeless towers and time-stunted castles’. To one old Irish guest, who remembers County Cork, as it used to be, she and her friends are no substitute for the real society they have replaced: ‘You can buy up a lot; you can't buy the past … these days, one goes where the money is—with all due respect to this charming lady. Those days, we went where the people were.’

The castle's money is good enough for the local shopkeepers, however, who have been known to stop Montefort's credit. Again, a comparison between this depressing town, and the liveliness of Mrs Fogarty's Clonmore drawing-room in The Last September, shows the decline:

There on the kerb outside Lonergan's, Lilia braced her shoulders as though facing reality—looking up then down the Clonmore straight wide main street at the alternately dun and painted houses, cars parked askew, straying ass-carts and fallen bicycles. Dung baked on the pavements since yesterday morning's fair; shop after shop had insanely similar doorways, strung with boots and kettles and stacked with calicoes—in eternal windows goods faded out. Many and sour were the pubs. Over-exposed, the town was shadeless—never a tree, never an awning. Ice cream on sale, but never a café. Clonmore not only provided no place to be, it provided no reason to be, at all.

(130-31)

Montefort (based on a deserted farmhouse near Bowen's Court but with much of the atmosphere of Bowen's Court itself¹⁴) has, like a house in a Somerville and Ross novel, ‘the air of having gone down’. The obelisk was built by a typical Anglo-Irish landlord:

Married the cook … went queer in the head from drinking and thinking about himself, left no children—anyway, no legits. So this place went to his first cousin.

(206)

Now it is isolated (‘no calls to the telephone for there was not a telephone, no vans delivering, seldom a passer-by, no neighbours to speak of’) and decrepit:

The green of the ivy over the window-bars and the persisting humidity of the stone-flagged floors made the kitchen look cool without being so. This was the room in Montefort which had changed least: routine abode in its air like an old spell. Generations of odours of baking and basting, stewing and skimming, had been absorbed into the lime-washed walls, leaving wood ash, raked cinders, tea leaves, wrung-out cloths and lamp oil freshly predominant. The massive table, on which jigs had been danced at the harvest homes, was probably stronger than, now, the frame of the house … The great and ravenous range, of which no one now knew how to quell the roaring, was built back into a blackened cave of its own—on its top, a perpetual kettle sent out a havering thread of steam, tea stewed in a pot all day, and the lid heaved, sank on one or another of the jostling pots, saucepans and cauldrons. Mush for the chickens, if nothing else, was never not in the course of cooking … The sink's one tap connected with a rain-water tank which had run dry—since then, a donkey cart with a barrel rattled its way daily down to the river pool … On the dresser, from one of the hooks for cups, hung a still handsome calendar for the year before; and shreds of another, previous to that, remained tacked to the shutter over the sink. These, with the disregarded dawdling and often stopping of the cheap scarlet clock wedged in somewhere between the bowls and dishes, spoke of the almost total irrelevance of Time, in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen.

(27-8)

The passage illustrates what is excellent in the novel—this is a fully realized room—and what is exasperating. ‘Mush for the chickens was never not in the course of cooking’ is a ludicrous piece of self-derived mannerism. The paragraph is full of similar affectations: the obtrusive placing of commas and of words like ‘now’, the coy adjectival phrases like the ‘perpetual’ kettle and the ‘ceaseless’ kitchen, the obligatory inversions, qualifications, and double negatives. In its striving for a heightened poetical mood the novel relies heavily on these familiar tricks of style: ‘All round Montefort there was going forward an entering back again into possession’; ‘Decay … was apparent—out it stood! Nothing now against it maintained the place.’

The manner blurs events and relationships. Fred's absorption with Jane, Antonia's brutal treatment of Lilia, Jane's attraction to Vesta Latterly, all promising studies of influence, are hazily rendered, especially if compared with, say, Thomas and Anna Quayne's marriage, or Leopold's encounter with Mme. Fisher. Maud, venomously Protestant and covered in boils, a horrid embodiment of ‘moral force’, is an exception, but she works as a parody of the haunted adults, and, in her obsession with Big Ben, as a convenient reminder of ‘the absolute and fatal’ stroke of time. By contrast, the characterization of Jane is particularly soft and conventional: ‘Her brows were wide, her eyes an unshadowed blue, her mouth more inclined to smile than in any other way to say very much—it was a face perfectly ready to be a woman's, but not yet so, even in its transcendancy this morning.’

Yet the novel does deal in ideas about time and memory which relate it to her better work. Jane's resistance to ‘the time she was required to live in’, her aversion to the past's ‘queeringness’—‘this continuous tedious business of received grievances, not-to-be-settled old scores’—is set ironically against the older generation's inability to free itself from the dead. The character most like the narrator, Antonia, is made to contemplate poignantly the effect of the wars on our response to death, and the post-war sense of unreality. This central passage explains and to some extent justifies the novel's shadowy, precious attenuations:

Life works to dispossess the dead, to dislodge and oust them. Their places fill themselves up; later people come in; all the room is wanted … Their being left behind in their own time caused estrangement between them and us, who must live in ours.

But the recognition of death may remain uncertain, and while that is so nothing is signed and sealed. Our sense of finality is less hard-and-fast; two wars have raised their query to it. Something has challenged the law of nature: it is hard, for instance, to see a young death in battle as in any way the fruition of a destiny, hard not to sense the continuation of the apparently cut-off life, hard not to ask, but was dissolution possible so abruptly, unmeaningly and soon? … These years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living in his lifetime … They were incomplete.

(63-5)

Almost ten years elapsed before the next novel. The only intervening work, written at a very low point in Elizabeth Bowen's life, was A Time in Rome (1960), too personal and erratic to be a successful guide book, too impressionistic for a historical study. It contains, however, some characteristic remarks about time and memory which point towards the last novels:

It is in nature (at least in mine) to make for the concrete and particular, to ‘choose’ a time and reconstitute, if one can, one or another of its moments … In Rome I wondered how to break down the barrier between myself and happenings outside my memory. I was looking for splinters of actuality in a shifting mass of experience other than my own. Time is one kind of space; it creates distance. My chafing geographical confusion was in a way a symptom of inner trouble—my mind could not be called a blank, for it tingled with avidity and anxieties: I was feeling the giddiness of unfocused vision. There came no help from reason, so I was passive … To talk of ‘entering’ the past is nonsense, but one can be entered by it, to a degree.¹⁵

The idea of being passively entered into by the past is derived from Proust, who has always interested Elizabeth Bowen. She quotes him at the start of The Last September, the first novel of time recalled. He is invoked in ‘The Mulberry Tree’, her 1934 account of her third English school, Downe House, which is (partly) the school in The Little Girls: ‘Memory is, as Proust has it, so oblique and selective that no doubt I see my schooldays through a subjective haze.’¹⁶ Eva Trout refers to Proust's idea of the overlap between imagination and memory; and in the last collection, Pictures and Conversations, there is a long, careful and penetrating essay on Proust's novelist-character, Bergotte. The Little Girls is the most ‘Proustian’ of her novels: it describes an involuntary recall of the past, and the breakdown set in motion by that recall. The novel not only contains a Proustian experience, it produced one: when she began her draft of an autobiography in the Seventies, she said that she had ‘completely forgotten’ one of her schoolgirl experiences ‘till it was returned to me by The Little Girls’.¹⁷

In one way, then, The Little Girls marks the culmination of a central preoccupation, the uncontrollable activity of memory and the disabling legacy of the past. She has, of course, set stories in the past before (The Last September) or re-entered the past in the middle of a novel or story, as in The House in Paris (which has the same structure as The Little Girls), ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, A World of Love, and ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, a story rather like this novel. The central section of The Little Girls, which describes schooldays at ‘St Agatha's, Southstone’, invokes the factual account of her schools in ‘The Mulberry Tree’, and the many characterizations of schoolgirls, like Theodora Hirdman at Mellyfield in Friends and Relations, or Pauline and her friend Dorothea in the ‘Going to School’ chapter of To the North, or the girl haunted by ‘the Crampton Park School Tragedy’ in ‘The Apple Tree’. She says in ‘Pictures and Conversations’ that ‘St Agatha's is imaginary, in that it has no physical origin.’¹⁸ But she admits that it runs together features from her three English schools, Lindum House, her Folkestone day-school; Harpenden Hall, a Hertfordshire boarding school (where, as one of a series of ‘crazes’, ‘a smallish biscuit tin, sealed, containing some cryptic writings and accompanied by two or three broken knick-knacks, was immured in the hollow base of a rough stone wall dividing the kitchen garden’¹⁹), and Downe House, her wartime Kentish boarding school, where the girls cultivated ‘foibles and mannerisms’ in the interests of social success, and ‘personality came out in patches, like damp through a wall.’²⁰

On either side of the novel's central section, the flashback to the three girl friends at school in 1914, are the two parts set in the Sixties. ‘Dinah Delacroix’ is a well-preserved, eccentric widow living in a Somerset villa, its garden lush with flowers and vegetables, in the company of her vain, temperamental, nosy house-boy, Francis (a faint reworking of Eddie) who waits (and spies) on Dinah while deciding what to do with his future, and her loyal simple old friend Frank Wilkins (a faint reworking of Major Brutt, and drawn, presumably, from Alan Cameron). The novel opens with Dinah embarked on her latest ‘craze’: burying evidence for posterity in a cave.

Clues to reconstruct us from. Expressive objects. What really expresses people? The things, I'm sure, that they have obsessions about …

(10)

As she and Frank haphazardly go about this whimsical task, a neighbour's question (‘Who's going to seal it up?’) and the sight of a crooked swing in the garden suddenly ignites Dinah's memory:

I've been having the most extraordinary sensation! Yes, and I still am, it's still going on! Because, to remember something all in a flash, so completely that it's not “then” but “now”, surely is a sensation, isn't it? I do know it's far, far more than a mere memory! One's right back into it again, right in the middle … They say—don't they?—one never is doing anything for the first time.

(18-19)

Fifty or so years before, she and two other ‘little girls’—‘Dicey’, ‘Mumbo’, and ‘Sheikie’—also buried evidence for posterity in a coffer in the school garden. Ignoring Frank's sensible warning (‘Can't you see, they're not there any more!’) Dinah is fired with the desire to summon her two friends and to dig up the treasure: ‘We are posterity, now.’ Her obsession sets in motion a comedy of reappearances and recognitions. ‘Sheikie’, ‘Southstone's wonder, the child exhibition dancer’ has become the respectable Mrs Sheila Artworth, wife of a Southstone estate agent, once a much-bullied little boy whom Dinah last remembers as stuck inside a drainpipe at a picnic. ‘Mumbo’, the clumsy, clever child of an unhappy marriage, is now Clare Burkin-Jones, owner of ‘MOPSIE PYE chain of speciality giftshops’, operating ‘throughout the better-class London suburbs and outward into the Home Counties’.

The first part, in which ‘Dicey’ brings about the reunion, is farcical, full of little fragmentary surprises and revelations, ending with ‘Sheikie's’ news that St Agatha's no longer exists: it was bombed in the Second War. The flashback of the second part to 1914 has a softening, mellowing effect on the novel. The suppressed romantic feeling between Dicey's beautiful, unworldly mother (whose husband killed himself before Dicey was born) and Mumbo's father, the sad, handsome Major, is tenderly touched upon, and the schoolgirl comedy (poetry recitations, swimming lessons, the visit of a suffragette aunt, shopping for a chain to go round the coffer in Southstone's picturesque old High Street, the end-of-term picnic) is nostalgically idealized, very much in the manner of the pre-war South Coast scenes in ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ (where Mrs Nicholson's relationship with the Admiral, and her refusal to believe in the coming war, anticipate this part of The Little Girls):

Summer evening concerts began in the Pier Pavilion, which like a lit-up musical box admired itself in the glass of the darkening mauve sea; above, the chains of lamps along the Promenade etherealized strollers in evening dress, from the big hotels, bright-ghostly baskets of pink geraniums and the fretwork balconies they were slung from.

(125)

The partings on the beach at the picnic between Dicey's mother and the Major, and between Dicey and Mumbo, just before the outbreak of war, are poignantly done. This, and the chilling account of the Major's home-life (his wife, another Mrs Kelway, ‘successfully cauterized her loved ones’), are much the best things in the novel, and have the haunting quality of a good short story. Elizabeth Bowen's potent memories of her childhood in England alone with her mother are once again put to good use here.

The jerky, comical tone associated with the present day is resumed in the third part, for the farcical night-time scene in which the three women dig up the coffer from what is now the back garden of a typical Bowenesque villa, ‘Blue Grotto’. The coffer is empty. After this discovery, Dinah breaks down; ‘Nothing's real any more.’ The last part of the book, in which Sheila and Clare, Frank and Dinah's grown-up sons, (with little girls of their own) look after the invalid, becomes increasingly sombre. The unhappiness of the two other women is revealed: Sheila, her dancing come to nothing, had, before her marriage, a clandestine affair with a sick man whom she left on his deathbed; Clare, whose marriage was ‘a mess’, has never quite recovered from her childhood passion for Dinah's mother—but will not answer the question, ‘Are you a Lesbian?’ Behind their conventionally unhappy stories lies the even more clichéd fate of the romantic, undeclared lovers of the last generation: Clare's father fell at Mons, Dinah's mother died in the outbreak of Spanish 'flu at the end of the war. Until now, Dinah is the only person in the novel who has avoided pain. The others accuse her of cheating:

All your life, I should think, you have run for cover. ‘There's Mother!’ ‘Here's my nice white gate!’ Some of us have no cover, nothing to run to. Some of us more than think we feel.

(230)

Dinah is made to pay for her self-protective infantilism by the sense of nullity which now comes upon her. In the last part of the book she becomes a kind of visionary commentator on the hollowness of contemporary life:

There's a tremendous market for prefabricated feelings. … And I'll tell you one great centre of the prefabricated feeling racket, and that is, anything to do with anything between two people: love, or even sex … So many of these fanciful ways people have of keeping themselves going, at such endless expense of time and money, seem not only unnecessary but dated.

(193-94)

Her breakdown is an interesting attempt at a study of alienation, which reveals Elizabeth Bowen's own current unease as a novelist. Dinah's disorientation impels her to raise the question of the value of art: if the past has gone, any attempt to recapture it, like her own pursuit of the coffer, must be a lie. A bad water-colour of the old Southstone High Street, which has itself long since disappeared, provokes this outburst:

Something has given the man the slip, so in place of what's given him the slip he's put something else in … It might be better to have no picture of places which are gone. Let them go completely.

(192, 195)

The statement points to the vacuum at the centre of The Little Girls.

The novel has used as its donnée the Proustian plot of the past being given back through the action of involuntary memory working through association. And other perceptible acknowledgments of À La Recherche accompany this central idea. Elizabeth Bowen tries for Marcel's sense that he lives ‘surrounded by symbols’²¹ by introducing, not very tactfully, symbolic props: the objects placed in the original coffer, which include a revolver (to be used more melodramatically in Eva Trout); a butterknife with a gnarled thumb-shaped handle bought by Dinah from ‘MOPSIE PYE’; three grotesque masks made by a local craftswoman; and the china objects which used to clutter Dinah's mother's cottage and which are, for Clare, ‘a fragile representation of a world of honour, which is to say unfailingness’.

The failure of that world reflects Proust's dictum that ‘the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost’.²² The novel also pursues Proust's interest in what goes on in the mind in sleep, and in the self-forgetfulness necessary for refinding oneself. And the abortive re-encounters between the three women—particularly the adult confrontation between ‘Dicey’ and ‘Mumbo’—conform to the pattern of disenchanting confrontations in Proust's novel, one of which Elizabeth Bowen describes in her essay on Bergotte: ‘A relationship … anticlimactic, patchy, uninspirational—a relationship haunted by what it should have been.’²³

But, as she points out, ‘a magnified Bergotte exists on another plane.’²⁴ The disappointments of social intercourse, the inevitable failure of love (since we love only what we don't possess or have lost) are redeemed, in À La Recherche, by what Elizabeth Bowen describes as ‘The notion of purgation, of self-redemption, of brought-back virtue being possible for the artist by means of art.’²⁵ This concept of redemption through art—which is the whole point of Proust's novel—is entirely lacking from The Little Girls. In Elizabeth Bowen's novel art is seen as a lessening of experience rather than its justification: there is no route out of disappointment and dispossession. Her negation of Proust's idea is reflected in the difference of style: The Little Girls is not at all Proustian in the way it is written. Roger Shattuck says well of Proust's method that ‘As his novel tenaciously aims at assimilating the whole meaning of life, so each sentence strives to digest its whole subject.’²⁶ Exactly the opposite effect is produced by the style of The Little Girls. The ‘whole meaning of life’ is held at arm's length; such ‘meaning’ as there is appears in fragmentary and diffused form and is presented in a manner which is without depth or resonance. Not only does the novel record an unlikely and whimsical situation, which is dressed up with awkward attempts at comedy, uneasy ventures into symbolism and contrived literary allusions (mostly to Macbeth, in order that the three ‘revenants’ should seem like the three witches—‘Sheikie’ even had a sixth toe at birth), but it also feels dubious and illusive.

Elizabeth Bowen has decided, at this point, to forgo the controlled, elaborate commentary and the sharp, minute, inward presentation of character which her earlier novels displayed. This narrative has, from the start, a provisional, indeterminate air, as my italics in this passage suggest. A man and a woman are carrying objects into a space in the ground:

This was, if anything, on the large and deep side … Across the uneven rock floor, facing the steps, was either a shallow cave or a deep recess—or, possibly, unadorned grotto? … A woman, intent on what she was doing to the point of a trance, could be seen in back-view … She may not have heard the man, who was wearing espadrilles—she did not, at any rate, look round.

(3)

The dialogue these two embark on is brusque, jerky, and flatly colloquial: ‘Oh, bother you,’ she grumbled, ‘do put your specs on!’—and the commentary on it is casually banal: ‘This was Frank's cue for another repeat-remark.’ Though a few familiar baroque mannerisms linger on (‘To pot it would all be going, before long’) the first chapter establishes a deliberately diminished and vapid level of prose. Although the flashback allows for a more lyrical, alluring manner to insinuate itself (‘From across the shrinking watery miles came an expiring sigh—not like the sound of wind, a sigh in itself’), all three sections are characterized by cumbersome techniques, which suggest an insecure search for a new method. There is the naming of people by their activities, as in ‘said the willing learner’, or ‘the maker-free then threw open the window’ or ‘sang out the homecomer’. There's the equivocal commentary, as in ‘Yet she faltered, if for less than an instant, or just barely—how rarely?—overrode a misgiving.’ And there's the preponderance of thin, banal dialogue:

‘I wondered whether you'd telephone.’

‘Well, I didn't.’

‘No.—Last night, when I rang up, you sounded so cross.’

‘You made me jump, suddenly coming through like that.’

‘That's the worst of telephones. What were you doing?’

‘Well, I was in my flat.’

‘Of course you were, else you couldn't have answered. What were you doing?’

‘Thinking about you,’ said Clare crossly.

(164)

These late techniques are not, I think, merely failures of assurance—though they are those. They suggest that she was becoming increasingly concerned with the concept of a breakdown in language. That Elizabeth Bowen's highly charged, contrived and controlled style should have been reduced to the clumsy procedures of The Little Girls can be attributed to more than obvious reasons of old age and a dissatisfaction with out-dated formulae. The last two novels incorporate the idea of a future without any verbal ‘style’ at all. When the three schoolgirls bury their most precious possessions in the coffer with a proclamation written in Mumbo's invented ‘Unknown Language’, they ask each other whether it matters that posterity won't understand them:

And it may all be the same, by then? They may have no language.

(134)

The idea of a future without language is even more pronounced in the last novel, Eva Trout, which, though of interest as an illustration of Elizabeth Bowen's late malaise, provides an unfocused and bizarre conclusion to her opus. The heroine, who is twenty-four at the start of the novel, is a recognisable type of ‘displaced person’: she recalls Annabelle in ‘The Last Night in the Old Home’ (‘Inside the big, bustling form of a woman she was a girl of ten’²⁷) and Valeria Cuffe, the demented heiress in ‘Her Table Spread’, ‘abnormal—at twenty-five, of statuesque development, still detained in childhood’.²⁸ Like those unmanageable innocents, Eva Trout, an orphaned heiress, has peculiar habits. She stammers, is incapable of weeping, cannot behave with normal indifference or self-protectiveness, takes obsessional delight in certain objects (her car, her audio-visual machines), is large and ungainly, and has ‘a passion for the fictitious for its own sake’. Her distraction is matched, as with all Elizabeth Bowen's most unworldly characters, by ‘the patient, abiding encircling will of a monster, a will set on the idea of belonging and of being loved.’ ‘I remain gone. Where am I? I do not know—I was cast out from where I believed I was,’ Eva complains. Her need to compensate for these feelings makes her dangerous: ‘You plunge peoples’ ideas into deep confusion … You roll round like some blind indestructible planet.’

Though she first appears in rural, homely circumstances—driving the vicar's wife and children in her Jaguar to look at a castle which used to be her school—it becomes apparent that she is out of touch with reality and attracts violence. Her family history is squalid and dramatic. Her father was a ‘popular’ businessman who ‘deviated’, running off with the ‘wicked’ ‘Constantine Ormeau’. Her mother was killed in a plane crash with her lover, just after Eva's birth. Twenty-three years later, her father committed suicide. Eva, left on Constantine's hands, considers that he has murdered both her parents.

Her oddness is mainly attributed to this macabre history, but also to her disjointed education. For a time she attended the dubious experimental school at the castle (a ‘Bavarian fantasy’ on the Welsh border) bought by her father as a means of getting rid of Constantine's other ‘friend’, Kenneth, whose authority over the school's rich little delinquents (wittily sketched) came to an abrupt end. At this school Eva has a passion for a wraith-like child called ‘Elsinore’. After being dumped at various temporary international homes, Eva asked to go to an ‘ordinary’ girl's school, where she fell in love with the brilliant young English teacher, ‘Iseult Smith’. At the start of the novel Eva is living with Iseult and her husband Eric Arble, whose shaky marriage, which has involved the end of her career and the compromise of his (from fruit farming to a garage) is weakening under Eva's demanding presence.

The random history of Eva's temporary homes and thwarted affections emerges patchily, not through Eva's thoughts but through information provided by other characters, and through an equivocal narrative which seems as much intent on obscuring characters and events as on establishing them. The fragmentary effect is sustained by a plot which jumps with deliberate waywardness through a series of unlikely journeys and settings: the novel's subtitle is ‘Changing Scenes’. Feeling betrayed by Iseult, Eva moves away from the Arbles and the neighbouring vicarage to a huge, gloomy, baroque villa (‘Cathay’) on the South Coast at Broadstairs. (Both the vicar's family and the villa return Elizabeth Bowen, for the last time, to her Kentish childhood.) Eric visits her, and Eva leads Iseult to suspect them of an affair. Then Eva suddenly disappears to America (where she accidentally encounters Elsinore). Her journey there is recorded in the letter of a comical American professor who becomes infatuated with her on the plane, but never reappears. Eight years later she returns to England with an adopted eight-year-old deaf mute, Jeremy, to find that the Arbles have separated, one of the vicarage daughters, Louise, has died, Constantine is as bland and shady as ever, and the vicar's son Henry has grown up into an elegant Cambridge undergraduate, who becomes the last of Eva's grand, impractical passions. Her time is erratically divided between stays in London hotels, outings to Cambridge and the castle with Henry, and a journey to France in search of a cure for Jeremy, whom she leaves with the Bonnards, two married ‘environmentalist’ doctors at Fontainebleau.

The preposterously haphazard ‘plot’ culminates in a farcical melodrama on Victoria Station. Eva and Henry are embarking on a ‘mock’ wedding journey (a scene staged, at her request, in payment for all her ‘longing in vain’ for him), witnessed by all the novel's protagonists, when Jeremy comes running up with a revolver he's found in Eva's luggage (which in fact—it's a very clumsy piece of plotting—belongs to the Arbles) and shoots his ‘mother’ dead. The violent ending has been anticipated not only by Eva's family history but also by a succession of drastic events—Louise's death; the abduction of Jeremy in London, from a sinister sculptress who is supposed to be minding him, by a ‘mystery’ woman who turns out to be Iseult; a reckless car drive with Henry (reminiscent of the ‘last ride together’ in To the North) and Jeremy's occasional fits of temper.

There is no radical departure here: these dramatic incidents arise from Elizabeth Bowen's permanent interest in the havoc wreaked by innocence. Eva's, and Jeremy's, destructive influence is a grotesque version of the violent extremism of Emmeline or Portia. That these unworldly girls, desperately intent on having their affections returned, are as dangerous to the adult world as it is to them, is a recurrent idea which is caricatured in the double personality of Eva and her son. The nature of the enemy is also familiar, though Elizabeth Bowen is now, as in The Little Girls, more outspoken about her characters' sexuality: St Quentin was not described as a homosexual, but he shares Constantine's qualities of aesthetic curiosity and unscrupulousness. Again, there's the conflict between the innocent girl and the disabused older woman, though Eva and Iseult, unlike Portia and Anna, are close enough in age for their relationship (like that of Dinah and Clare) to bear the suggestion of a potential or thwarted love-affair. (Though Elizabeth Bowen deals very unsympathetically with homosexuals in Eva Trout, there's a clear expression of understanding for lesbian feelings in the last two novels.) The women's names suggest their roles: Eva, ‘cast out from where I believed I was’ (the first section is called ‘Genesis’), Iseult the temptress, who ‘betrayed’ Eva's hopes, ‘having led them on’. As well as being victim and seductress, however, they present two versions of the same malaise. Eva, who cannot weep and would prefer not to be able to speak (‘What is the object? What is the good?’) asks the question: ‘What becomes of anyone's nature?’ The more articulate and literary Iseult speaks of her deadened feelings (‘I've undergone an emotional hysterotomy’) and describes life as an ‘anti-Novel’: no importance, no sensation, attaches to events. She herself has been trying to write a novel which was ‘still-born’ and she arranges to meet Eva in Dickens's house at Broadstairs, a scene which provides an excuse for her to meditate enviously on his rich literature of ‘longing’. The idea of dispossession, particularly in contrast with the Victorians, is again central.

A development from the usual methods, however, is felt in the haphazardness of the novel's plot and the sketchiness of its relationships. There are patchy attempts at depth of character: Henry's sardonic combativeness with his father, and Iseult's matching up to Constantine have potential. But, clearly, this isn't what now interests her. Eva Trout is the most schematic, as well as being the most disorganized, of her novels. Her liking for Forsterian ‘guardians’ (like Mr Emerson and Mr Beebe in A Room with a View) has already been displayed in The Death of the Heart. In her last novel the interplay between good and evil angels is no longer suppressed beneath a realistic level: Eva Trout unabashedly presents itself as a fairy tale, with Eva as its spellbound princess. Its settings (the castle, ‘Cathay’), its names (Eva, Iseult), and its arrangement of characters, all suggest this, quite apart from Eva's propensity for strange journeys, sudden appearances and fantastical inventions. The novel is full of guardians. At the start there's a contest of wills over Eva between Iseult and Constantine; towards the end there's a struggle for authority over Jeremy between Eva, Iseult, the sinister sculptress, and the wise Bonnards. There are even two men of God, Henry's father, stern but incapacitated by hay fever, and Constantine's latest friend, a suspect Anglican East End priest who ‘specialized in iniquity’.

Of all these figures of authority, the French doctors, who reject ‘the horrible doctrine of Predestination’ and speak wisely for happiness (‘a matter of genius’) and for love (‘We are at its mercy, but not altogether’) are the most convincing. But their belief in choice and self-improvement in the end has no bearing on the fated outcome of the relationship between Eva and Jeremy. This final act is presumably meant to be, to an extent, triumphant: Jeremy, the only character with the true authority, that of pure innocence, liberates Eva through his violent act from the world to which she is so ill-adapted. The novel doesn't make this point clearly, but certainly the wordless relationship between Eva and Jeremy is its most powerful subject.

Eva's alienation is a form of instability. Her inability to articulate, her fantasies, her dislocated sense of her own past (‘Time, inside Eva's mind, lay about like various pieces of a fragmented picture’) handicap her to the point of insanity. But the deaf-mute child, whose physical condition provides an image of Eva's alienation, seems, obscurely, to compensate for her abnormality, to make her seem normal. Like Eva, Jeremy doesn't want to speak; but unlike her, he feels no lack: ‘He would like to stay happy the way he is.’ Jeremy's inward contentment provides a queer, mirror-image of Eva's desolation.

The effect was not so much of more intelligence as of a somehow unearthly perspicacity. The boy, handicapped, one was at pains to remember, imposed on others a sense that they were, that it was they who were lacking in some faculty.

(184)

When Jeremy and Eva are alone together in America they inhabit an ‘Eden’ which is entirely innocent of words. Her attempts to have him cured are a betrayal of that state (analogous to Iseult's seduction of Eva through education). Jeremy's shooting of Eva is partly felt to be an involuntary revenge for the betrayal of what are earlier described as ‘the inaudible years’:

His and her cinematographic existence, with no sound-track, in successive American cities made still more similar by their continuous manner of being in them, had had a sufficiency which was perfect. Sublimated monotony had cocooned the two of them, making them as near as twins in a womb. Their repetitive doings became rites … They had lorded it in a visual universe. They came to distinguish little between what went on inside and what went on outside the diurnal movies, or what was or was not contained in the television flickering them to sleep. From large or small screens, illusion overspilled on to all beheld. Society revolved at a distance from them like a ferris wheel dangling buckets of people. They were their own. Wasted, civilization extended round them as might acres of cannibalized cars. Only they moved. They were within a story to which they imparted the only sense.

(221-22)

The references to the cinema recur at the end of the novel, which is made to seem like a scene in a film, with Jeremy as the ‘child star’. Clearly, this is felt to be the art form of a posterity without language. As long as Jeremy and Eva are undivided, they have found the perfect means of entering the still innocent, still inheritable, speechless future. It's thus no accident, though the change of scene might look gratuitous, that this is the only one of her novels to be set partly in America, where the conditions of the future, such as the ascendancy of film over the novel, can be more immediately ascertained. The prospect of an entirely ‘visual universe’ is not offered as entirely consolatory. But our present conditions, the novel suggests, can no longer be mastered or even registered by our language:

Feel?—I refuse to; that would be the last straw! There's too much of everything, yet nothing. Is it the world, or what? Everything's hanging over one. The expectations one's bound to disappoint. The dread of misfiring. The knowing there's something one can't stave off. The Bomb is the least. Look what's got to happen to us if we do live, look at the results! Living is brutalizing: just look at everybody!

(277-78)

This last novel, as much in its unhappy struggle with its own language and structure as in its account of alienation, describes an almost unbearable present, with which the traditional novel of order and feeling can no longer deal.

Notes

1. Anthony Trollope, A New Judgement (London & New York, O.U.P., 1946). CI [Collected Impressions], pp. 241-42.

2. WL [A World of Love], p. 48.

3. LG [The Little Girls], p. 193.

4. ET [Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes], p. 86.

5. ‘Books in General’, New Statesman XLII (20 October 1951), pp. 438-39.

6. ‘The Bend Back.’

7. Glendinning, p. 200.

8. Glendinning, p. 218.

9. Spencer Curtis Brown, Foreword, PC [Pictures and Conversations] xxxviii, suggests Waugh as an influence on this change of style.

10. WL, p. 221.

11. LG, p. 19.

12. ET, pp. 108-9.

13. ‘The Demon Lover’, DL [The Demon Lover and Other Stories].

14. Glendinning, p. 197.

15. A Time in Rome (1960), p. 6.

16. ‘The Mulberry Tree’, in The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands ed. Graham Greene (Jonathan Cape, 1934), pp. 45-9. CI (dated 1935), p. 196.

17. ‘Pictures and Conversations’, PC, p. 57.

18. ‘Pictures and Conversations’, PC, p. 46.

19. Ibid, p. 57.

20. ‘The Mulberry Tree’, CI, p. 186.

21. Proust, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, tr. Andreas Mayor, Time Regained, (Chatto & Windus, 1970), Vol. XII, p. 265.

22. Ibid, XII, p. 228.

23. ‘The Art of Bergotte’, Marcel Proust, ed. Peter Quenell (Weidenfeld, 1971). PC, p. 81.

24. Ibid, p. 82.

25. Ibid, p. 99.

26. Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars (Chatto & Windus, 1964), p. 122.

27. ‘The Last Night in the Old Home’, CJ [The Cat Jumps and Other Stories].

28. ‘Her Table Spread’, CJ.

Title quotation: ‘The Bend Back’. Cornhill No. CLXV (Summer 1951), 221-27.

A Note on References

Page references to the novels are to the Cape Uniform Edition. In the chapters on individual novels, bracketed page references follow the inset quotations. In the chapters on short stories, the title and volume of the story follows each inset quotation. A full contents guide to the volumes of short stories is found in the bibliography. All other references are given in the footnotes at the end of each chapter.

The following abbreviations have been used in the references:

A: Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (Longmans, 1962).

AL: Ann Lee's and Other Stories (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926)

BC: Bowen's Court (Longmans, 1942).

CI: Collected Impressions (Longmans, 1950).

CJ: The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (Victor Gollancz, 1934; Cape, 1949).

DD: A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (Cape, 1965).

DH: The Death of the Heart (Victor Gollancz, 1938; Cape, 1948)

DL: The Demon Lover and Other Stories (Cape, 1945, 1952).

E: Encounters (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1923).

ET: Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes (Knopf, New York, 1968; Cape, 1969).

FR: Friends and Relations (Constable, 1931; Cape, 1951).

H: The Hotel (Constable, 1927; Cape, 1950).

HD: The Heat of the Day (Cape, 1949, 1954).

HP: The House in Paris (Cape, 1935, 1949).

JC: Joining Charles and Other Stories (Constable, 1929; Cape 1952).

LAR: Look at All Those Roses (Victor Gollancz, 1941; Cape, 1951).

LG: The Little Girls (Knopf, New York, 1964; Cape, 1964).

LS: The Last September (Constable, 1929; Cape, 1948).

PC: Pictures and Conversations (Allen Lane, 1975).

TN: To the North (Gollancz, 1932; Cape, 1950).

WL: A World of Love (Knopf, New York, 1955; Cape 1955).

Glendinning: Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer by Victoria Glendinning (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).