SOURCE: "'There Is No Elsewhere': Elizabeth Bowen's Perceptions of War," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 73-81.

On book application forms at the British Library there occasionally appears this notation: "It is regretted that this work was destroyed by bombing in the war; we have not been able to acquire a replacement." This statement serves as a reminder of the irreparable damages of war, which destroys history even as it is created. The intricate fabric of British history, woven with a sense of cultural permanence, was burned through during the Blitz. Lives were lost, books were burned, works of art and architecture vanished, a way of life disappeared. Even amid this destruction, however, creativity continued. Elizabeth Bowen's wartime short stories speak to later generations, answering the question: "what must it have been like to live in that place at that time?"

A chronicler of life during the bombing, Bowen recorded the emotional and psychological tenor of a city under siege. She was specially qualified for this task, working as an ARP warden and narrowly missing death when her Regent's Park home was bombed. But the "action" of wartime London, people scurrying to bomb shelters, corpses lying in the streets, children crying in the night, is not the stuff of Bowen's fictional documentary. Instead her war manifests itself in strained social encounters, in changing mores, in the dreams and memories of shattered psyches. Already a respected author, recognized for the "comedy of manners" of her novels and early short stories, Bowen transcends that category with these wartime works, showing in her mature and subtle style a gift for treating serious issues and a mastery of her craft.

A great deal has been written on Bowen's art as demonstrated in her novels; far less attention has been paid to her short stories. The recent publication in America of her collected stories provides a perspective for the study of Bowen's canon. In her review of the collection, Eudora Welty aptly expressed an appreciation of Bowen's skill: "Elizabeth Bowen's awareness of place, of where she was, seemed to approach the seismetic; it was equaled only by her close touch with the passage, the pulse, of time." She is indeed a gifted fabricator of atmosphere and climate, both psychological and physical. An examination of three stories—one set in Ireland during the early years of war, another in the heart of London in the midst of war, and a third in the city just after V. E. day—provides at once an understanding of Bowen's wartime perceptions and an appreciation of her artistry as short-story writer.

In the neutral Ireland of "Summer Night," everyday life continues uninterrupted; beneath the calm surface, however, the reverberations of war's destructiveness and moral disintegration are palpable. Peace and beauty exist as mirages. In the opening paragraph a bright, burning reality contrasts with a golden other-worldliness:

As the sun set its light slowly melted the landscape, till everything was made of fire and glass. Released from the glare of noon, the haycocks now seemed to float on the aftergrass: their freshness penetrated the air. In the not far distance hills with woods up their flanks lay in light like hills in another world—it would be a pleasure of heaven to stand up there, where no foot ever seemed to have trodden, on the spaces between the woods soft as powder dusted over with gold. Against those hills, the burning red rambler roses in cottage gardens along the roadside looked earthy—they were too near the eye.

Light, color, and texture create landscapes in two different worlds. The first is one of escape. The hills are those of "another world … a pleasure of heaven." Haycocks are "released," floating as the landscape melts. All "in the not far distance" is "soft as powder dusted over with gold." Fresh air carries the pleasing scent of hay. But closer in, by the road, burn "earthy" roses "too near the eye," part of a more tangible world. The senses—sight, smell, nearly even touch—are alive and alert. The hills also seem alive, like animals, possessing "flanks." In this beautifully constructed paragraph Bowen foreshadows the perspective afforded the characters in "Summer Night." A look at life close up is, at the very least, disconcerting; one looks with pleasure only into the distance of memories, dreams, and illusions.

Through this peaceful landscape speeds Emma, a married woman anxiously en route to a rendezvous with her lover. Emma envisions her encounter with her ever-practical, more experienced lover as a romantic adventure. That illusion is dispelled later when she realizes that she is "being settled down to as calmly as he might settle down to a meal." The distant dream is converted, close up, into a much colder reality. The idealistic immaturity that Emma has harbored and cherished dies: "The adventure (even, the pilgrimage) died at its root, in the childish part of her mind…. She thought for a minute he had broken her heart, and she knew now he had broken her fairy tale."

Emma's romantic adventure, like the strange summer night, affects others in her life. Back home in her bed, Emma's little girl, Vivie, responds to the night in her own way. "One arbitrary line only divided this child from the animal: all her senses stood up, wanting to run the night." She impishly strips off her nightclothes, chalks colorful snakes and stars on her body, and dances wildly on her mother's empty bed. Savage young Vivie responds to the night in a sensuous way that unwittingly imitates her mother's own pursuit of pleasure and release. Her flame is extinguished when great-Aunt Fran envelopes her in a proper pink eider-down, makes her say prayers, and sends her back to bed.

The disintegration of life as it once was, represented by Emma's extramarital affair, is inseparable from war. Old Aunt Fran senses that something is not quite right about Emma's trip away from home, about the world, about the night. Disturbed by the unsettling evening, she tries to pray and to sleep, but she cannot:

The blood of the world is poisoned, feels Aunt Fran…. There are no more children: the children are born knowing…. There is not even the past: our memories share with us the infected zone; not a memory does not lead up to this. Each moment is everywhere, it holds the war in its crystal; there is no elsewhere; no other place…. What is the matter tonight—is there a battle? This is a threatened night.

Aunt Fran mourns the loss of innocence of the young, "born knowing." All is now tainted by the war; there is no purity, no past, no holiness. "Each moment … holds the war in its crystal," and the war, in turn, holds everything in its grasp. Something infectious is in the air; it is war.

A fourth perception of the night is offered in the dreams of middle-aged Queenie, a quiet, deaf, pretty woman who has paid Emma's lover a social call just before Emma's arrival. In her silent world, solitary, chaste Queenie is the only character affected calmly by the night. Her experience balances Aunt Fran's feeling that memories are no longer possible. She drifts off to sleep, ending the story with her peaceful dream:

This was the night she knew she would find again. It had stayed living under a film of time. On just such a summer night, once only, she had walked with a lover in the demesne…. That had been twenty years ago, till tonight when it was now.

The best elements of Bowen's short-story writing are found here: the delicate and subtle creation of environment, a blurring of margins between the real and the unreal, the destruction of a romantic ideal, the perspectives of sensitive female characters who seem to function as emotional barometers. Bowen exercises a steady though unobtrusive control over her subject and theme. Through the many impressive images of "Summer Night" one never loses grasp of the story's major thread: summer night, not-so-distant war. a household without its mistress, a shattered illusion. Ireland hardly seems "neutral." There is no escape; war pervades the environment like the night. Only Queenie, living in "a world to herself," finds peace in distant dreams. Life, close up, burns like "red rambler roses," like Vivie's flushed little form.

A story comparable to "Summer Night" is "Mysterious Kôr," the last story in the early collection The Demon Lover. This tale is the highwater mark in Bowen's self-defined "rising tide of hallucination." The wave of illusion and dreams in the original collection crests in this story, one of Bowen's best. As in "Summer Night," the story's power is evident in the opening paragraph:

Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital—shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs; every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree-darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead.

Here Bowen distinguishes three cities: the "real" London; the London that is the "moon's capital"; and the London that strangely combines both the real and the unreal, that place the reader will come to know as "Mysterious Kôr." Time is also carefully presented. "Late, but not yet midnight" reveals the time of night; the reference to a blackout gives the story its place in the century; "naked winter flowerbeds" establishes the season. Like the opening passage from "Summer Night," evocation of atmosphere and the juxtaposition of reality and illusion prefigure the experiences of the characters. The theme of "Mysterious Kôr," survival in fantastic conditions, is presented in five succinct sentences.

Appropriately, Bowen employs the light of the moon, a traditional symbol of fantasy and magic, to create atmosphere. Like the sunset on Irish hills, the near-midnight moonlight creates another world. In a less sinister but equally powerful way, the searching, drenching moonlight pursues the city as German bombers might. The city lies stretched out beneath its full impact; the moon is "full," "remorseless," blazing. All else is "polished," "shining," "whited," "ghostly," "brittle," "naked" London is a corpse, or perhaps T. S. Eliot's "evening … spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table." A similar sense of desolation, passivity, and sterility is conveyed in the prose. Human action is mocked by the moon: "The futility of the black-out became laughable." London is truly leveled by the moon's strength. Whether "soaring" or "crouching," buildings look alike; every nook, cranny, and "niche" has disappeared. Depth cannot be found on earth but in the sky above, which reaches "miles, yes, miles, overhead." The moon's-eye-view, like a camera, sweeps across the city's once-varied levels all at once; roofs, curbs, flowerbeds, the lake all meld to form one shadow reflection of their purveyor. The moon creates a futuristic city, exposing the ultimate threat of this world war, that the earth may become a barren planet, another reflector, like the moon, "shallow, cratered, extinct."

But the moon is no collaborator. It is its own power. The political enemy is absent from this picture:

However, the sky, in whose glassiness floated no clouds but only opaque balloons, remained glassy-silent. The Germans no longer came by the full moon. Something more immaterial seemed to threaten, and to be keeping people at home. This day between days, this extra tax, was perhaps more than senses and nerves could bear. People stayed indoors with a fervour that could be felt: the buildings strained with battened-down human life, but not a beam, not a voice, not a note from a radio escaped. Now and then under streets and buildings the earth rumbled: the Underground sounded loudest at this time.

Life in London is almost unbearably tense and feverish. The "extra tax," the strain, the tangible "fervour" are all shut up within. Dwellings teem with human inhabitants, "battened-down human life," like ships' holds in a storm-tossed sea. The sky, now "glassy," is as silent as the world's surface; it is the earth beneath that rumbles. This second paragraph communicates a feeling of repression and imprisonment more than of sterility and desolation. Life, here insulated and enclosed, goes on despite threats of bombs or "something more immaterial."

Into this unnatural, surreal scene, up from the Underground, emerge a girl and a soldier with nowhere to go. Glancing around the city Pepita shares her vision with boyfriend Arthur, baptizing this new place "mysterious Kôr." When Arthur protests that there is no such place, Pepita explains:

What it tries to say doesn't matter: I see what it makes me see…. This war shows we've by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it…. By the time we've come to the end, Kôr may be the one city left: The abiding city.

The vision to which Pepita so tenaciously clings, her fantasy city, is a sort of spiritual bomb shelter, a place for the soul to seek safety when there is literally no refuge for the body.

Pepita's device for escape contrasts with that of her roommate, Callie, with whom Pepita and Arthur will have to share a small flat that night. Virginal Callie, "the guardian of that ideality which for Pepita was constantly lost to view," is "sedate, waxy and tall—an unlit candle," like that other symbol of purity for which she seems to be named, the calla lily. Callie hides within her naiveté, her innocence, her "still unsought-out state." She reacts to the moonlight with a half-formed understanding. "At once she knew that something was happening—outdoors, in the street, the whole of London, the world. An advance, an extraordinary movement was silently taking place." Callie copes with the bombed-out world not by escaping through fantasy but by seeing that world only partially—through a veil of inexperience. The ironies of a suppressed life do not strike her as strongly as they do Pepita because she has not yet begun to live fully. When Pepita and Arthur arrive at the flat, Callie's old-fashioned expectation that she will share a bed with her roommate kills any hope that the other two may have had for lovemaking. Betrayed by the radiance of the moon and by Callie's ingenuousness, and unable to find a dark corner, the young couple settle down to sleep in separate beds.

In the middle of the night, when Arthur wakes from a restless sleep, Callie joins him for a brief conversation in the dark. Arthur tries to explain how the night and Pepita's vision have affected his fatalism:

"A game's a game, but what's a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets in you and you can't laugh it off…. Now I see why she sleeps like that if that's where she goes … when two people have got no place, why not want Kôr, as a start? There are no restrictions on wanting, at any rate."

"But, oh, Arthur, can't wanting want what's human?"

He yawned. "To be human's to be at a dead loss."

To have lived in that place at that time, according to Bowen, one would have been forced to seek shelter. One shelters oneself in naiveté and innocence, if possible; if not, one can try dreams, dreams so powerful they exist even in waking hours. Neither innocent nor dreaming, Arthur states the wisdom of the disenchanted, the harsh fatalism of a restricted, seemingly doomed generation. His view of life impinges on Callie's world, bringing about a loss of innocence. Marking the waning of the moon, Callie returns to her bed, thinking:

… it seemed likely that there would never be such a moon again; and on the whole she felt this was for the best … she tried to compose her limbs; even they quivered after Arthur's words in the dark…. The loss of her own mysterious expectation, her love of love, was a small thing beside the war's total of unlived lives.

Beside her, Pepita sleeps, dreaming of Kôr.

In "Mysterious Kôr" one finds the same elements as in "Summer Night." The night air that affected the Irish women becomes haunting moonlight in the later story. Queenie's memory-dream that ends "Summer Night" is echoed in Pepita's concluding fantasy-dream. Though Pepita is the woman in love, it is Callie who, like Emma, suffers the loss of a romantic ideal. In both stories the stolid, relatively sanguine male is the agent of this new awareness. Interestingly, Emma's lover and the young soldier, Arthur, share a similar treatment at Bowen's hands. The male characters are depicted almost exclusively through dialogue and action. Bowen rarely represents the male psyche as thoroughly as the female.

This pattern is repeated in a third story, "I Hear You Say So," in which the people's reaction to armistice is expressed almost solely in terms of the female. Here one finds as well thematic and technical echoes of the previous two stories.

It is a warm night in London a week after V. E. Day. A nightingale's song travels through the air, shaking the city's inhabitants out of a postwar numbness. Everyone within hearing distance of the bird is disturbed: lovers in the grass, families in the park, old ladies on a park bench, young widows in their beds. London is already on its way to restoring itself. Victory flags wave in the breeze; lights blaze; windows are audaciously flung open. It is a markedly different city from the "battened-down" London of "Mysterious Kôr":

High up, low down, the fearlessly lit-up windows were like exclamations. Many stood wide open. Inside their tawny squares the rooms, to be seen into, were sublimated: not an object inside them appeared gimcrack or trivial, standing up with stereoscopic sharpness in this intensified element of life. The knobbed or fluted stem of a standard lamp, the bustlike curves of a settee, the couples of photographs hung level, the fidgeting of a cockatoo up and down its perch, the balance of vases on brackets and pyramids of mock fruit in bowls all seemed miraculous after all that had happened…. Each of these theatres was its own drama—a moment perpetuated, an integration of all these living-unliving objects in surviving and shining and being seen. Through the windows, standing lamps and hanging bowls overflowed, spilling hot light into the warm dark.

Now that the war is over, it is permissible to use words such as "miraculous" again. One may now consider "a moment perpetuated," conceive of "integration" and the possibility of something "surviving and shining and being seen." This time the scene is illuminated artificially; there is no longer a danger in "being seen." Man is in the process of reclaiming his own.

The first perceivers of the nightingale's song are Violet and Fred, lovers lying casually in the park grass. They debate whether it is a thrush or a nightingale singing on someone's wireless:

She said: "Funny if you and me heard a nightingale."

"You and me don't look for that sort of thing. It may have been all very well for them in the past."

"Still, there must stilt be nightingales, or they couldn't have put one on to the wireless."

"I didn't say they'd died out; I said they don't come round. Why should they? They can't sell us anything."

Later Violet says, "You begin to wonder … suppose the world was made for happiness, after all?" The nightingale sings again, "drawing out longings, sending them back again frozen, piercing, not again to be borne." Fred's unwillingness to be moved by the nightingale's song dampens Violet's reaction. "'He was right,' she thought, 'we're not made for this; we can't take it.'"

Two middle-aged women sitting on a park bench wonder why the bird has stopped singing. Mary speculates that he has paused to listen. Naomi observes, "Disappointing for them to listen, perhaps. But why not? Why should a nightingale get off scot free, after everything it is able to do to us?" On their way home she comments:

Apart from anything, it's too soon. Much too soon, after a war like this. Even Victory's nearly been too much. There ought not to have been a nightingale in the same week. The important thing is that people should go carefully. They'd much better not feel at all till they feel normal. The first thing must be, to get everything organized.

Of course, it is impossible for people to "go carefully." Aunt Fran and Callie realize this, one with aged weariness, the other with new understanding. People had been existing during the war years in the futility of "unlived lives." They will no longer do so.

Ursula, a young widow, is awakened from her sleepwalking by the nightingale's song. It draws her attention to the no-longer enclosed park: "Every place was invaded and desecrated." She remembers her husband's grandmother saying earlier in the evening. "I shall be glad to go. Look at the shameless people rolling on the grass. Is it for this we have given Roland?" Ursula does not share this sense of indignation and regret. The nightingale symbolizes for Ursula her husband's youth. She realizes that "all they had hoped of the future had been, really, a magic recapturing of the past." Past, present, and future become one for Ursula. Somehow the bird's song fills her with a "profound happiness." Restoration to a sense of normality will be painful, "too much" perhaps, but it is already in process. Ursula is another of Bowen's women whose perceptions and reactions help explain the times.

Populating her stories with impressionable and impressive women of various ages, Bowen looks at the psychological impact of war, the emotional mending and patching that goes on when people find themselves under attack. According to Bowen, people cope by dreaming, whether awake or asleep, of other times and of other places or by assuming a kind of fatalistic numbness or naive blindness. In dialogue, description, and characterization she recreates a special period in history, at once fashioning credible, living characters, evoking the essence of a particular environment, and revealing truths about the human psyche. It is particularly fortunate that we have been left the fictional "reports" of a writer whose talent lies not only in the telling of who, when, and where, but also in the exploring of why and how.