SOURCE: Christensen, Lis. “Communication.” In Elizabeth Bowen: The Later Fiction, pp. 66-83. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2001.

[In the following excerpt, Christensen explores Bowen's use of various means of communication, both spoken and written, in her last four novels.]

In looking at how Bowen lets her characters convey their meaning to one another, I use ‘communication’ to embrace all exchanges that may establish or reflect a relationship between people, ranging from the serious interchange of ideas to the most casual snippets of conversation, and including also the deliberate absence of verbal expression: the eloquence of silent response.

The limitations of speech were a recurrent concern of Bowen's, culminating in her last novel with Eva Trout's obsession with communication devices and her adoption of the deaf-mute child who shoots her dead on the last page of the book. Other forms of communication besides speech also figure prominently in her fiction—letters and telegrams, for instance. Letters are of course supreme examples of imperfect communication when they do not reach their destination, as happens in Eva Trout to Professor Holman's long effusion (ET [Eva Trout] 129), and to a letter from Henry to Eva which she never gets because she has moved on, leaving no forwarding address: ‘In the rack of the cross-eyed Paris [hotel], therefore, the letter probably is still, more flyblown with each day’ (ET 214). Communication by letter receives an added twist in A World of Love, which centers on an old packet of love letters to an unknown woman that has repercussions on the lives of all the main characters. A quite different kind of communication is at the root of The Little Girls, where objects are buried in order to say something about their owners to future generations. In Eva Trout the way Eva communicates with her deaf-mute son is another thing altogether: ‘extra-sensory’ (ET 158; see pp. 77-78 below).

That the one-way communication of writing is by nature imperfect and open to interpretation may be illustrated by the following seemingly pointless piece of dialogue in The Heat of the Day; reading the will whereby his distant cousin Francis Morris has left him his estate, Stella's son, Roderick, uses ‘mean’/’meant’ seven times in half a page:

‘Which did Cousin Francis mean?’

‘Which what, darling?’

‘Did he mean, care in my own way, or, carry on the old tradition in my own way?’

Uncomprehending, Stella returned her eyes to the cropped top of Roderick's downbent head. ‘In the end, I suppose,’ she hazarded, ‘it would come to the same thing?’

‘I'm not asking what it would come to; I want to know what he meant.’

‘I know. But the first thing is that you'll really have to decide—’

‘What should I decide? He's decided. It's become mine.’

‘We must think what you're going to do.’

‘But I want to know which he meant. Does he mean, that I'm free to care in any way I like, so long as it's the tradition I carry on; or, that so long as I care in the same way he did, I'm free to mean by “tradition” anything I like?’

‘There was another cousin of yours, Roderick, a Colonel Pole, at the funeral, who said—‘

‘Yes, mother, yes; but never mind Colonel Pole. What we must make out is, what Cousin Francis meant.’

(HD [The Heat of the Day] 87-88)

That ‘mean’ should attract so much attention in The Heat of the Day is consistent with the novel's preoccupation with the corrosive influence of wartime propaganda and the restrictions on free speech. But faulty understanding dogs much communication in all the novels, and ‘mean’ does heavy duty in numerous spoken exchanges between characters who fail to understand one another, often in quite banal contexts: ‘What do you mean?’—‘I mean to say’—‘What I mean, though’—‘You mean … ?’—‘I do wish I had said nothing … From now on I shall. I mean I shall not.’ The failure of the speakers to convey their meaning is usually resolved on the spot, in the course of conversation. Some misunderstandings have the air of serving merely to introduce a note of humour into the text, but the explanation involved may also serve the purpose of drawing attention to the subject; this happens e.g. in A World of Love when Lilia is explaining to Fred that she had not expected it to be him she saw in the garden:

‘You know I was never one to imagine; and who was I to imagine it could be you? As we now are, anything seemed more likely. Guy seemed more likely, dead as he is.’

‘What d'you mean,’ he said, ‘“as we now are”?’

‘You know you know. What's the use of asking?’

He gave a frown.

She put her hands to her face and added: ‘As we have come to be.’

(WL [A World of Love] 102)

In the two-way intercourse of conversation, listening is of course as important as speaking, and several of Bowen's characters complain, like Louie in The Heat of the Day, ‘Oh, you never listen to what I say’ (HD 322). Yet in spite of possible inattention and misunderstandings, face-to-face conversation would still seem to be the best means of communication between people (and there are many passages of dialogue in Bowen's fiction). In The Heat of the Day the importance of conversation is pointed up, again by some clowning on the part of young Roderick, when he finds what Stella dismisses as ‘notes on some conversation’ in the pocket of her lover's dressing-gown, and this triggers off the following outburst from her son:

Really, Mother … conversations are the leading things in this war! Even I know that. Everything you and I have to do is the result of something that's been said. How far do you think we'd get without conversations? And can you really suppose that someone where Robert is doesn't have conversations about conversations, even if he doesn't have conversations himself?

(HD 63)

We may note in passing a wry comment on what counts as conversation between the subplot's Louie and Connie, by way of a comparison with the presumably more lofty exchanges in government circles at 10, Downing Street; the girls live at 10, Chilcombe Street, and their bickerings are called ‘conversations at No. 10’ (HD 153).

TELEPHONES AS METAPHORS OF NON-COMMUNICATION

One of Bowen's most common metaphors of imperfect communication is the telephone; an obvious choice, perhaps, since one cannot see the person one is talking to. (There are of course no telephones in the Irish Big Houses, Mount Morris in The Heat of the Day and Montefort in A World of Love, where people communicate with one another more ideally, face to face).

In the novels I am considering there are not so very many full telephone conversations where we can hear both voices speaking. Exceptions include Eva's more than shady contact concerning the illegal adoption of her child in Eva Trout. In the same book there is also a revealing telephone conversation between her and Mme Bonnard; it is good to have this conversation in full, for it says not a little about the now chilly relations between the two women. Most telephone calls are one-sided, however. The Little Girls has a full-page take-off on a telephone conversation which should rightly be between three people (wishful thinking at the time the novel was written); the speaker's words to the character who cannot hear the other end of the line are given in parentheses:

Oh, Sheikie, hullo! … Why yes, of course I am me! (She knew my voice) … I was just telling Mumbo, you knew my voice … Yes, of course she is here. Or rather, I am with her … In a Mopsie Pye shop … A garden of all delights. (She wants to know what your shop's like.) … I was telling Mumbo you want to know what her shop's like …

(LG [The Little Girls] 149; original punctuation)

Characters often complain of the impossibility of talking properly on the phone, and telephone conversations are rarely perfect, even as such conversations go. In The Heat of the Day, for instance, Stella sometimes speaks in her ‘company voice’, or lowers her voice and ‘can't talk now’ because Harrison is in the next room; or she cannot hear properly because Roderick is calling her from a public telephone in a station while a train is pulling in. In what is perhaps the most remarkable instance of non-communication in the book, the characters simply do not answer the ‘demoniac’ ringing of the telephone at Holme Dene, Robert's family home, where his mother and sister have called him down to decide whether to accept an offer for their ugly Victorian house. Well aware that the counter-spy is on his trail, Robert starts violently when the telephone rings; and the reader, too, will surely be interested in what the call might be about—much more so than the rest of the family, who spend so long debating who it might be and who is to answer it that the telephone ominously stops ringing ‘of its own accord’ (HD 265).

THE HEAT OF THE DAY

The question of open and honest communication is a very real issue in The Heat of the Day. The habit of watching what one says is an integral part of the wartime atmosphere of the book, reflecting the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ slogan launched by the Ministry of Information and popularised in a series of striking posters by Fougasse. Stella herself moves ‘at the edge of a clique of war, knowing who should know what, commanding a sort of language in which nothing need be ever exactly said’ (HD 172), and Harrison complains of everyone being ‘cagey’ (HD 42). He himself characteristically finds it difficult to express himself (‘I hardly know how to put it’ [HD 29]) and speaks in clipped, jerky sentences:

Harrison turned back to close the door behind him, but paused to ask: ‘Not expecting anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Good. By the way, I found your downstairs door on the latch. That in order?’

‘Quite. I left it open for you.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, as though touched. ‘So I shut it—that was in order, too?’

(HD 26)

That Harrison's hesitant speech may be a sign of the universal problem of finding adequate and socially acceptable words to convey one's meaning is suggested by the fact that Stella's exemplary son Roderick uses the same expression as Harrison, ‘to put it’, when he is explaining to his mother why he did not apply for compassionate leave when he heard of Robert's death:

I know how I could have put it; in fact I was going to put it that way if it came to the point—I should have put it that you and Robert were engaged.

(HD 295)

The otherwise talkative Robert Kelway is the prime example of not ‘talking’ in the police jargon sense of the word. ‘This is the first time I've ever talked,’ he says to Stella in their last scene (HD 282), and his lack of frankness is at the heart of the love-espionage plot, culminating in Stella's heart-broken words when he has finally confessed to her: ‘Still, tell me. If you had told me more—!’ (HD 270). In so far as Robert's treason is explained in the text, he gives part of the explanation by referring to himself as a Dunkirk wounded man,¹ and as we know him in 1942 he still limps from his Dunkirk wound (though we note that his limp is most pronounced when he is acting The Wounded Soldier). In the present context it will be natural to mention another of Robert's self-justifications: the meaninglessness he finds in certain words. For him there are no countries left, only names, and words like ‘betrayal’ are part of a dead language that he feels he has had to steel himself against, as he tells Stella in their last scene:

What is repulsing you is the idea of ‘betrayal’, I suppose, isn't it? In you the hangover from the word? Don't you understand that all that language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same: even you do. Words, words like that, yes—what a terrific dust they still can raise in a mind, yours even: I see that. Myself, even, I have needed to immunize myself against them; I tell you I have only at last done that by saying them to myself over and over again till it became absolutely certain they mean nothing. What they once meant is gone.

(HD 268)

In the book, Robert's father is dead and the Kelway home dominated by the stifling presence of his widow, whose failings include a total insensitivity to language. When Stella is on a visit with Robert, Mrs Kelway shows no interest whatsoever in her guest and quashes any attempt on her part to make conversation; on Stella's volunteering the information that her son, like Mrs Kelway's grandson, is in the Army, she is merely met with an ‘Oh’ by her hostess. ‘For, why should she speak?’ comments the narrator, ‘—she had all she needed: the self-contained mystery of herself. Her lack of wish for communication showed in her contemptuous use of words’ (HD 109-110). Robert's grotesque sister Ernestine is always laughing wildly and barking out orders rather than speaking, in a parody of the empty language that passes for conversation in this arid atmosphere; for even with no strangers present, the Kelways ‘communicated with one another with difficulty, in the dead language’ (HD 252). Their contemptuous use of language also appears in the repressive upbringing that Robert's seven- and nine-year-old niece and nephew are given; crowning the amazing list of do's and don't's is the insensitive baby-talk with which Mrs Kelway addresses her granddaughter, referring to herself in the third person: ‘If it's not too much trouble, Grannie would like some bread’ (HD 112). With an upbringing in this language-inimical house, it is perhaps not surprising that Robert Kelway should have a warped attitude to words.

The question of language also informs the subplot revolving on the two working-class girls, Louie and Connie. Louie is in many ways close to this central concern of the novel. Her compulsive fibs that fool no one are a low-scale counterpart to Robert's deceitfulness, and also to Stella's glib performance in the final chapter, at the inquest after Robert's death. It is this simple-minded factory-girl, moreover, who ‘[has] no words’ and cannot ‘speak grammar’, who is given a long, important speech about the frustration of not being able to express oneself:

Look the trouble there is when I have to only say what I can say, and so cannot ever say what it is really. Inside me it's like being crowded to death— … I could more bear it if I could only say. Now she tonight [Stella], she spoke beautifully: I needn't pity her—there it was, off her chest. If I could put it like she does I might not be stealthy: when you know you only can say what's a bit off, what does it matter how much more off it is? … I would more understand if I was able to make myself understood.

(HD 245-246)

The narrative voice amplifies this naïve outpouring later, in a perceptive passage about the power and far-reaching effect of language. The blanks in Louie's vocabulary determine the way her mind works, we read, they ‘operated inwardly on her soul’ (HD 306); knowing only the words ‘refinement’ and ‘respectability’, she is incapable of recognizing any virtue divorced from those two, and her early hero-worship of Stella turns to moral condemnation when she sees in the papers a sensational version of her heroine's statement at the inquest: there has been an expensive flat, she reads, bottles, a lover, other men friends. Louie now sees Stella as a fallen woman, with the result that, having no one to admire, she drops back into her promiscuous habits.

The Heat of the Day is by way of being a key text in the matter of communication. We have often been told that political treason is the theme of the novel, and much ink has been spent in pointing to Robert Kelway's Nazi allegiances. Though these cannot be denied, I would suggest that they are in the long run of secondary interest. The near-identification of the two Roberts is too pointed to be ignored: not only do they have the same Christian name, they are also expressly linked in Stella's reflections about her lover's calculating attitude to their fellow-countrymen. He must have been spying on them all, she finally realizes, just as Harrison has been spying on him, and ‘She now saw [Robert's] smile as the smile of one who has the laugh. / It seemed to her it was Robert who had been the Harrison’ (HD 275). The use of the definite article before Harrison's name here confirms earlier suggestions that he is a type rather than an individual. His enigmatic personality, the uneven set of his eyes, his sudden comings and goings, his being in the know and apparently in a position of some power—all this contributes to giving his character an uncanny air of being not quite human. And since Old Harry is a nickname for the Devil, it is natural to see Harrison as an emissary from the Underworld (a role he shares with the sinister chauffeur Harris in A World of Love, as pointed out p. 47).

Coupled with the indeterminate nature of Robert's espionage, the link between him and Harrison suggests that the treachery on which the plot hinges is not essentially a betrayal of any one political system. It is something more universal, something that thrives in times of repression, and something that Stella herself is part of. The truth of Harrison's allegations is brought home to her during her trip to Ireland half-way through the book; but before that, the very first question she asks her lover about Harrison has been the beginning of what she later sees as her ‘espionage’—her ‘watch on Robert's doors and windows, her dogging of the step of his thought, her search for the interstices of his mind’ (HD 172). In the most dramatic confrontation between her and Harrison she accuses him of having distorted love by making her spy on her lover—by making her like himself. To his ‘You and I are not so unlike—yes, it's funny,’ she throws out: ‘Why? Below one level, everybody's horribly alike. You succeed in making a spy of me’ (HD 138). Stella's words receive additional emphasis from their effect on Harrison: he winces when he hears them and walks away from her over to the window, where he stands ‘headed into the curtain like an animal blindly wanting to get out of a room’ (HD 138). The link between the two of them is underlined in this scene by the intimate ambience of her flat and the window embrasure where she joins him behind the blackout curtains, and sexual attraction seems part of that link. (Some verbal reflections of this are taken up in the next chapter).

All these things considered, The Heat of the Day may be read as a demonstration of the way confidence and trust between human beings may be stamped out by those in power, whether by democratic governments in times of national emergency or, by inference, by any authoritarian regime at any time. Bowen is no Orwell and her wartime novel no Nineteen Eighty-Four, yet it does seem to me that in its insidious undermining of mutual trust and its pervasive mood of ‘caginess’ and lack of ‘frankness’, the book is fundamentally as pessimistic as Orwell's futuristic vision. It was said almost two thousand years ago by the Roman historian Tacitus, writing of the cultural and political totalitarianism of the Emperor Domitian, that the ‘investigations of the secret police have deprived us even of the give and take of conversation’, or, more literally, of ‘the intercourse of speech and hearing’.² In betraying this essential human faculty, the Robert Kelways and Robert Harrisons of this world are equally guilty. They make traitors of the rest of us.

EVA TROUT

In Eva Trout Bowen makes her final fictional statement about the limits and possibilities of communication. It is no longer, as in The Heat of the Day, a question of surmounting or surviving the deadening influence of totalitarian measures, but, rather, of people being by nature or upbringing or circumstances so inhibited that they cannot attain the supreme human good of making themselves understood by their fellow human beings.

Eva is presented as an outsider in the social world of the 1960s, one of her disadvantages allegedly being her ‘cement-like conversational style’ (ET 17). This is not necessarily the view of the narrator, or of the reader. The phrase occurs in a paragraph largely held in language alluding to the patterns of thought or speech of her teacher Iseult Smith, whose ‘vivisectional interest’ (ET 33) has originally drawn her to Eva:

Iseult Smith had gone out of her way to establish confidence, for her own reasons—she proposed to tackle Eva's manner of speaking. What caused the girl to express herself like a displaced person? The explanation—that from infancy onward Eva had had as attendants displaced persons, those at a price being the most obtainable, to whose society she'd been largely consigned—for some reason never appeared: too simple, perhaps? Much went into the effort to induce flexibility. But Miss Smith had come too late on the scene; she had had to give up. Eva by then was sixteen: her outlandish, cement-like conversational style had set. Moreover—the discouraging fact emerged—it was more than sufficient for Eva's needs. She had nothing to say that could not be said, adequately, the way she said it.

(ET 17; italics original)

The question in lines 2-3 in this quotation, ‘What caused the girl to express herself like a displaced person?’ reflects Iseult Smith's thoughts; some lines on, the question ‘too simple, perhaps?’ would seem to be the narrator's comment on the teacher's overly clinical approach. That Iseult Smith here is very much The English Mistress appears from the fact that she is now called ‘Miss Smith’. 40 pages or so later the narrative shows the teacher-pupil relationship in action, so to speak, in a flashback to Eva's first term at the girls' school where she is sent after the disastrous mixed-school experiment at the castle. Miss Smith's own noli-me-tangere attitude does not prevent her from treating Eva in a way that is as manipulative as Miss Brodie's in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); and, with a mind running in the familiar groove of English Literary History, she does not hesitate to divert Eva's nascent religious feelings into those well-worn channels:

‘One thing,’ declared Eva,’ I have done.’

‘Well—what?’

‘Learned that religious poem.’

‘Religious poem?’

‘It is to God, I think.’

‘Oh, one of the metaphysicals. Say it, then.’

(ET 65)

Ignoring the religious content of George Herbert's verses then quoted in the text, and deliberately ignoring, likewise, any suggestion of erotic tension between Eva and herself, the apparently neo-critically trained Iseult Smith straightaway launches into her favourite subject: ‘You see how pure language can be? Not more than two syllables—are there?—in any word’ (ET 66). In her reading of Iseult's reaction as the ‘ineffable emergence of lesbian panic’, Patricia Juliana Smith posits that ‘language’ has by now become ‘subliminally analogous with sexual desire’ for both Eva and Iseult (116-117). Taking ‘language’ to mean ‘verbal communication’, perhaps more narrowly ‘spoken communication’, this is in line with an observation in A World of Love, allusively reflecting Lilia's thoughts about the future of her marriage: ‘Survival seemed more possible now, for having spoken to one another had been an act of love’ (WL 105). Iseult's obsessive interest in language also colours her initial reaction to Constantine Ormeau, whose letter she finds ‘garlands of affectation’ (a style which she nevertheless adopts herself in her later letters) (ET 33). With regard to that conversational style of Eva's found so regrettable by her teacher, we may well feel that what Eva lacks is merely the airs and graces with which to embellish her own utterances, but that there is in fact nothing wrong with her actual meaning. This is apparent in the scene between Eva and Iseult in Broadstairs that I have referred to earlier (pp. 59-60). And we can hardly blame Eva for being suspicious of the false endearments and speechifying of many of the other characters—Eric Arble's repeated ‘sweetheart’, for instance. One endearment in particular haunts her for years, spoken by the mother of her sick room-mate Elsinore at the castle school: ‘How is my darling?’ (ET 47); but this, too, is merely a mechanical expression, for in spite of all her sweet words Elsinore's mother turns out to be just as flighty and uncaring as Eva's own. Eva has in fact a salutary habit of unmasking pretentious speech by asking the meaning of words she does not understand, as she does in her last words, spoken to her former guardian on the last page of the book; Constantine is making a wedding speech:

‘Er—life stretches ahead. May a favourable concatenation of circumstances … No, here I become a trifle tied up, I think. That is enough.—Henry, you'd better kiss Eva.

Henry did so, lightly on the cheek.

‘Constantine,’ asked Eva, ‘what is “concatenation”?’

Her last words.

(ET 268; punctuation original)

Eva's conscious or subconscious awareness of her reluctance to speak, brought about by years of virtual isolation, is given visual form in the communication devices with which she fills her drawing-room at Cathay, the house she has leased on North Foreland:

Outstanding examples of everything auro-visual on the market this year, 1959, were ranged round the surprised walls: large-screen television set, sonorous-looking radio, radio-grammophone in a teak coffin, other grammophone with attendant stereo cabinets, sixteen-millimeter projector with screen ready, a recording instrument of BBC proportions, not to be written off as a tape-recorder. Other importations: a superb typewriter shared a metal-legged table with a cash register worthy to be its mate; and an intercom, whose purposes seemed uncertain, had been installed.

(ET 118)

When she returns briefly to Cathay after her stay in America, these installations have become obsolete and their futility is apparent. Perhaps we may take this to mean that there is in fact no substitute for the give and take of conversation. It is an open question whether Eva's killing at the hand of her adopted son suggests the failure of any kind of communication, even wordless, between people.

Eva's difficulty in communicating with others is magnificently symbolized in her adoption of a child who turns out to be deaf-mute. The eight years that elapse between parts I and II of Eva Trout are the ‘inaudible’ years of her life with Jeremy, when they have been cocooned ‘as near as twins in a womb’ (ET 188), hardly distinguishing between what went on inside and what went on outside the films and television they watch in silence. These seem to have been happy years, with Jeremy ‘capering naked on Eva's bed like Cupid cavorting over the couch of Venus’ (ET 189) in a Boucher-like image of Eva as the Temptress. But Jeremy is growing up. At the same time, Eva is beginning to conquer her innate suspicion of speech: she is ‘ready to talk’, though she senses that this will make her a traitor to the American years with Jeremy (ET 188). She has apparently been led to take him to England by the sight of something approaching manhood in his eyes, not realizing the shock it would be to him. It is as though he has been brought into another dimension, and it makes her a stranger to him. There is even so much submerged hostility in his relationship with her that he gouges deep eye-holes in the clay head he is modelling of her: ‘Out of their dark had exuded such non-humanity that Eva had not known where to turn’ (ET 190). This is revealed in the text just before we hear that Jeremy has been carried off from the studio for some hours by an anonymous woman—Iseult Arble, it appears later. We are not told how Iseult and Jeremy communicated, but the text insists that they had a profound liberating effect on each other. They take a bus-ride to Westminster Abbey, where Jeremy traces the letters of monument inscriptions ‘as though responsible for incising them for the first time’ (ET 245; we recall that a beautiful handwriting is one of Eva's few accomplishments). Ever since this day Jeremy is withdrawn as never before, and the habitual contact between him and Eva changes: where Eva could earlier communicate with him even without lip-reading, she now has to touch him to get his attention. Their common universe is a thing of the past, and the location of their last weeks together is aptly Fontainebleau, a town redolent of past history.

That it should be French doctors who look set to cure Jeremy of his muteness and that French will thus be his mother tongue, as it were, adds yet a dimension to the book's concern with language (anticipated early in the book by Iseult's French translations). The issue of conveying meaning in what is not one's native tongue is not taken up, however, and Eva's long conversation with Dr Bonnard in the last chapter is conducted in English.

SILENCE

Jeremy apart, silence between Bowen's characters is as eloquent as words. It may be referred to as a ‘vocabulary’ (HD 187), and when Clare in The Little Girls chooses not to take up a bantering remark of Dinah's, the text tells us that she conveys her meaning by a ‘formidable silence’ (LG 168). Characters do in fact not always answer questions put to them, and our attention is often drawn to their silent responses. In The Heat of the Day, for instance, Stella's growing suspicion of her lover is mirrored in her silences: when he asks her whether she is influenced by what Harrison says, she tries to dismiss his question by silence (HD 191); and to his ‘You love me?’ she ‘eloquently’ answers nothing at all (HD 200). Or silence may suggest that a character is fully aware of the unspoken emotions of others, as we realize that young Dicey in The Little Girls knows perfectly well how her mother feels about Clare's father, who puts in an apparently chance appearance at the beach picnic: on seeing him, ‘the child said nothing, merely went back diligently to amassing shells’ (LG 130). In Eva Trout, silence is palpably a cover for Eva's embarrassment on several occasions, e.g. when as a girl she evades a question of Iseult Smith's by ‘examin[ing] the path's brickwork; then, down to its very roots, some near-by grass’ (ET 59); or later when the talk veers dangerously near to her feelings for Henry Dancey, and she looks fixedly at a mobile in his room (ET 180), or into the distance (ET 231), or at some trees (ET 233), rather than speak.

As a characteristic woman's response, silence has been the subject of much discussion in feminist criticism, and since Bowen's protagonists are almost exclusively female it is usually women we hear of ‘not answering’ or ‘remaining silent’. The blustering, bumbling Eric Arble in Eva Trout, who is occasionally at a loss for words, is one of the few exceptions: ‘That's what comes of trying to talk,’ he says early in the book, after a misunderstanding with his wife. ‘Can anybody wonder I keep my mouth shut?’ (ET 34). In The Heat of the Day there is a revealing glimpse of earlier generations of ladies at Mount Morris:

Though seated together, hems of their skirts touching, each one of the ladies had not ceased in herself to reflect alone; their however candid and clear looks in each others' eyes were interchanged warnings; their conversation was a twinkling surface over their deep silence. Virtually they were never to speak at all—unless to the little bird lying big with death on the path, the child being comforted out of the nightmare without waking, the leaf plucked still quivering from the felled tree.

(HD 174-175; my italics)

There is a subtle connection between the pregnant silences of Bowen's characters and the silence of her locations. In The Heat of the Day, Stella's silent responses and Robert Kelway's silence about his espionage are thus echoed in the silent London townscape, where ‘silence mounted the stairs, to enter her flat through the door ajar; silence came through the windows from the deserted street’ (HD 23); and the ‘islands of stricken silence’ (HD 91) formed by the roping-off of dangerous areas are a visual counterpart of the lovers' mutual silence and their ‘hermetic world’ (HD 90). In Eva Trout, Eva and her adopted son lead a ‘cinematographic existence with no sound track’ (ET 188), living in a visual universe of film and television that mirrors Jeremy's enforced silence. (Other instances of Bowen's thematic use of silent surroundings will be taken up in Chapter 8, ‘Stages and Stage Properties’).

DIALOGUE

In view of the many spoken exchanges between Bowen's characters, it may be appropriate to round off this chapter with a few observations about her handling of dialogue.

One may note, first, the use of stilted or meaningless dialogue to reflect the embarrassment or nervousness or withheld emotion of the speakers, as in this exchange between Dinah and Clare about a telephone conversation:

‘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.

(LG 143)

Similarly, the first words between Iseult Smith and Constantine Ormeau in his office reveal the wary tension of the speakers:

‘You're well, I hope?’ he asked with renewed concern.

‘Very. And you?’

‘So-so. This is a treacherous time of year.’

‘Though spring,’ she suggested, ‘is more treacherous, isn't it? In winter one at least knows what to expect.’

‘How true. Yes, that is very true.’

(ET 35)

Spontaneous or troubled thoughts on the part of the speaker are often expressed in sentences that may appear garbled in isolation but turn out to be perfectly idiomatic when read aloud, or with an inner voice, with the correct placing of stress. (Much of James Joyce's writing makes the same demands on the reader). Stella's enigmatic ‘I don't think I think’, for instance, makes perfect sense in the context: ‘“You think, in me this was simply wanting to get my hand on the controls?” / “I don't think I think”’ (HD 273). A puzzling line or two of Robert's may likewise easily be cleared up when read aloud:

When you didn't speak I thought you thought silence better. … There were other times when I was less certain you knew. But I did not know you did not know till you asked me.

(HD 271)

Such ‘difficult’ lines often involve a pun-like repetition apparently unnoticed or unintended by the speaker. This is particularly noticeable in The Heat of the Day, where such discourse may be seen as a colloquial variant of the book's general dislocation of language; it often occurs in passages whose style alludes to the ways of speech and thought of the characters:

Here now was Louie sought out exactly as she had sought to be: it is in nature to want what you want so much too much that you must recoil when it comes.

(HD 248)

This does not make for easy reading. But then, as William McCormack comments, speaking of a somewhat similar example in the underground café scene in the same book, ‘Easy reading is not intended’ (227).

Another recurrent feature of Bowen's fictional exchanges is equally easy to parody, but demonstrably functional in that it sets the pace for our reading and conveys a good deal about the mood or character of the speaker: the use of syntactically intrusive speech tags of the type ‘“Do you think,” she asked, “it's going to rain?”’ (WL 137). On the one hand such tags undoubtedly encourage slow reading, but as against this they potentially speed up the reading process for the simple reason that an interrupted line of thought or an interrupted sentence naturally leads the eye of the reader on to its conclusion. Intrusive tags may reflect the hesitancy with which something is said, as in the conversation between young Roderick and the mentally disturbed Cousin Nettie in The Heat of the Day:

‘I believe I am very odd. And you must not,’ she said with a gesture, ‘tell me I'm not, or I shall begin to wonder.’

…

‘I thought,’ she said, still in agitation, ‘it had all begun again.’

…

‘But,’ said Roderick, having taken thought, ‘I don't really think I'm like that.’

(HD 208)

Similarly, the following lines from The Little Girls say a good deal about the guarded atmosphere at dinner-table conversation between Sheila and Dinah's sons:

‘Who thought up those three extra-secret things?’

‘That,’ she said, having thought, ‘I believe was me.’

‘Neither of us,’ said Roland—entitling himself, by a glance, to speak for his brother—‘now, of course, can ever hope to rest till we know what they are.’

(LG 233)

Syntactically interruptive locutionary clauses like these are used frequently and with great effect in The Heat of the Day, where the pull of opposite forces is in keeping with the tension at the heart of the novel. Syntactic breaks range from a mild hiatus when tags coincide with the beginning of a subsidiary clause (‘I'd no idea,’ she said, ‘you were going to feel like this’ [HD 161]) to the startling separation of subject from verb or verb from predicate (‘I don't,’ she said, ‘see anyone I have ever seen’ [HD 233]). The hiatus is felt most violently when the locutionary clause is expanded, as it often is—especially in reporting the speech of Harrison, who is patently unsure of himself and consequently often acts up: ‘“Absolutely,” he said with fervour, “not!” (HD 221); “He might, of course,” added Harrison, studying the short, clean nail of his right thumb, “fairly ask you what came over you” (HD 228); “Which was not,” said Harrison, secretively fiddling with a cigarette but not lighting it, “unnoticed”’ (HD 232).

This characteristic construction was one of the things that Daniel George, Cape's otherwise appreciative reader, singled out for comment in the manuscript of The Heat of the Day. Glendinning reports that he wrote four pages of notes on what he called ‘snags in the crystal stream’ for Bowen to think about (93:153). One sentence which came in for comment was the one I have just quoted: ‘“Absolutely,” he said with fervour, “not!”’. George's remark was: ‘Far, I diffidently suggest, fetched.’ But Bowen did not amend the construction in The Heat of the Day (where it also occurs as ‘“Actually,” he had to admit, “not”’ [HD 137]—here, too, reporting a line of Harrison's), and she retained it even in her last novel: ‘“Evidently,” he said, approvingly, “not” (ET 166); this is spoken by Constantine Ormeau and aptly reflects his pompous, deliberate manner of speech, where every word is weighed separately and given its due.

Characterisation through speech thus combines with the dynamics of reading to forge Bowen's dialogue into a complex experience in which the active participation of the reader plays no little part.

In the texts I have been considering, instances of imperfect communication far outweigh those where people relate to one another in full understanding and openness. Lack of frankness is at the root of the tragic outcome of the Stella-Robert love-affair in The Heat of the Day, and even though the relationship between young Dicey and her mother in The Little Girls is in many ways idyllic, there is necessarily much that is unsaid between them (e.g. Mrs Piggott's love for Clare's father). Technical innovations of course do nothing to mitigate such psychological restraints, and they have their own disadvantages. Telephoning is attended with all kinds of drawbacks that go beyond the limitations imposed by the speakers' surroundings that I have instanced above (background noise, background company). A telephone call may come at a bad time or when people are simply unprepared for it, for instance: Clare sounds cross when Dinah calls her up, because, as she says, ‘You made me jump, suddenly coming through like that’ (LG 143); and some subjects seem unsuited to telephone conversation: ‘What a thing to ask her over the telephone!’ says Clare, when Dinah impetuously asks Sheila whether she has ever killed anyone (LG 150). Writing is ‘hopelessly distant’, as Iseult Arble remarks (ET 115)—and Bowen's narratives contain a good deal of ‘writing’ in the form of verbatim letters. The possible advantages of avoiding the constraints and embarrassments of a face-to-face interview by actually choosing to write rather than speak are not taken up. In the long run, non-verbal communication is no solution either, for the perfection of Eva's and Jeremy's ‘cinematographic’ life ‘with no sound track’ in America does not outlast the boy's growing need for independence. Eva Trout is the only one of Bowen's post-war novels to end on a significant note of finality: Eva overcomes her reluctance to speak only to be killed on the very last page by the flawed communication represented by her adopted son. The outlook for the future is bleak indeed in this last novel.

Notes

1. Robert was apparently a member of the British Expeditionary Force, which was evacuated from the beaches of the Northern French port of Dunkirk (Dunkerque) at the end of May 1940. See illustration opposite.

2. The first is M Hutton's translation, revised by R M Ogilvie, of adempto per inquisitiones etiam loquendi audiendique commercio (Tacitus, Agricola 2.3), in volume 1 of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus, pp. 28-29; the second translation of loquendi audiendique commercio is from Ogilvie and Richmond's annotated edition of the Agricola, p. 135.

Select Bibliography

Works by Elizabeth Bowen Discussed or Cited

The Heat of the Day (1949). Penguin ed. 1962. Abbr. HD

A World of Love (1955). Penguin ed. 1983. Abbr. WL

The Little Girls (1964). Penguin ed. 1982. Abbr. LG

Eva Trout (1968). Penguin ed. 1982. Abbr. ET

Collected Stories (1980). Penguin ed. 1983. Abbr. CS

The Last September. London: Constable & Co, 1929.

To the North. London: Victor Gollanz, 1932.

The House in Paris. London: Victor Gollanz, 1935.

The Death of the Heart. London: Victor Gollanz, 1938.

Bowen's Court. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1942.

“English Novelists.” Impressions of English Literature. London: Collins, 1944.

The Shelbourne Hotel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.

A Time in Rome. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1960.

Pictures and Conversations. Ed. Spencer Curtis Brown. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

The Mulberry Tree. Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Virago Press Ltd, 1986.

Notes from Eire. Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940-42, with a Review of Irish Neutrality. Aubane Historical Society, 1999.

Other Works

Atkins, John. Six Novelists Look at Society. London: John Calder, 1977.

Auden, W H. Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957. London: Faber (1966), 1969.

Austin, Allan E. Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. IX = The Letters and the Life, vol. II. London, 1862; reprinted Stuttgart—Bad Cannstatt, 1961.

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press, 1995 and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Chessman, Harriet. ‘Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.’ Twentieth Century Literature 29 (1983), 69-85.

Christensen, Lis. ‘A Reading of Elizabeth Bowen's “A Day in the Dark”’. Irish University Review 27, 2 (1997), 299-309.

Coates, John. Social Discontinuity in the Novels of Elizabeth Bowen. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Cited as Coates 98a.

Coates, John. ‘The Misfortunes of Eva Trout.’ Essays in Criticism XLVIII, 1 (January 1998), 59-79. Cited as Coates 98b.

Coughlan, Patricia. ‘Women and Desire in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen’, in Sex, Nation and Dissent. Ed. Éibhear Walshe. Cork: Cork University Press, 1997.

Craig, Patricia. Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986.

Dorenkamp, Angela G. ‘“Fall or Leap:” Bowen's The Heat of the Day’. Critique. Studies in Modern Fiction X, 3 (1968), 13-21.

Eliot, T S. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 1944.

Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (1954). New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Flaubert, Gustave. L'Education sentimentale. 1869.

Foster, R F. Paddy and Mr Punch. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1993.

Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Phoenix Paperback, 1993.

Glendinning, Victoria. ‘Gardens and Gardening in the Writings of Elizabeth Bowen’. Elizabeth Bowen Remembered. The Farahy Addresses. Ed. Eibhear Walshe. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998.

Greene, Graham. ‘The Dark Backward: A Footnote’. London Mercury 32 (1935); Collected Essays. London: The Bodley Head, 1969.

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

Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert. Ed. F E Hutchinson (1941). Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972.

Hoogland, Renée C. Elizabeth Bowen. A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Johnson, Toni O'Brien. ‘Light and Enlightenment in Elizabeth Bowen's Irish Novels.’ Ariel: A Review of English Literature 18, 2 (April 1987), 47-62.

Jordan, Heather Bryant. How Will the Heart Endure. Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914.

Kenny, Edwin J. Elizabeth Bowen. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1964.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

Lassner, Phyllis. ‘Reimagining the Arts of War: Language and History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day and Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness.’ Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 14 (1988).

Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Houndmills & London: Macmillan Education, 1990.

Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen. An Estimation. London & Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1981. Revised edition: Vintage, 1999.

Leech, Geoffrey N and Michael H Short. Style in Fiction (1981). London & New York: Longman, 1991.

McCormack, William. Dissolute Characters. Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1993.

McDowell, Alfred. ‘Identity and the Past. Major Themes in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen’. Unpublished dissertation: Bowling Green University, 1971.

McGowan, Martha. ‘The Enclosed Garden in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love.’ Éire-Ireland XVI, I (1981), 55-70.

Meredith, George. Selected Poetical Works of George Meredith. Ed. G M Trevelyan. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1912.

O'Toole, Bridget. ‘Three Writers of the Big House: Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Jennifer Johnston’ in Across the Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. Ed. Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley. Belfast and Dover, New Hampshire: The Blackstaff Press, 1985.

Radcliffe, Mrs Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co, 1975.

Sellery, J'nan and William O. Harris. Elizabeth Bowen. A Bibliography. Austin: Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 1981.

Smith, Patricia Juliana. Lesbian Panic. Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 1961.

Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens (1979). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989.

Tacitus. Agricola, trans. M Hutton, rev. R M Ogilvie, in vol. I of Tacitus in Five Volumes. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann (1914), 1970. De Vita Agricolae, ed. R M Ogilvie and Sir Ian Richmond. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967.

Tracy, Robert. The Unappeasable Host. Studies in Irish Identities. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998.

Walshe, Eibhar, ed. Elizabeth Bowen Remembered. The Farahy Addresses. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998.

Wessels, Andreis. ‘Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love: A “Cultural Analysis” of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the Twentieth Century.’ The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 21, 1 (1995), 88-95.

Weston, Ruth D. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. 1919.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925.

Yeats, W B. Collected Poems (1950). London: Macmillan & Co, 1961.