SOURCE: "Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September: The Loss of the Past and the Modern Consciousness," in Durham University Journal, Vol. 82, No. 2, July, 1990, pp. 205-16.

The existence of a seemingly obvious frame of reference for The Last September may mislead the critic. Given the intrinsic interest of the Irish "Troubles" and of the last phase of the Protestant Ascendancy, the historical setting of The Last September, it is tempting to see them as the defining factors of the book's meaning. The strongly autobiographical derivation of the novel which its author herself emphasized ("I was the child of the house from which Danielstown derives"), seems to enforce attention to the Anglo-Irish predicament. As a result critics have often approached the novel as if called upon to strongly disapprove of its inhabitants. The Anglo-Irish were casualties of an "inevitable" historical process which they ought, nevertheless, to have foreseen or prevented in some way. Danielstown is burned down so, obviously, its inhabitants must have deserved their fate. For example, E. J. Kenney's condemnation of the "guilty void at the center of such a life" as that of the Anglo-Irish landowners colours his view of Lois Farquar, the novel's heroine. She has a fundamental affinity with them because both lack "any vital connection with life". Kenney sees the Anglo-Irish as a whole, as "adolescent only children". Hermione Lee's position is subtler. She sees the "satiric mode" of the comic scenes of The Last September as a "form of elegy" for the Ascendancy in decline. The poignance of this decline is that it involves the loss of those qualities recorded in Bowen's Court "the 'grand idea', the sense of family pride, the almost mystical apartness". Hermione Lee's mention of Bowen's Court is apt, because Elizabeth Bowen's long family history provides an essential context for The Last September. It records a much more complex and ambivalent attitude to her Anglo-Irish heritage, and her Bowen ancestors than some critics have allowed:

In the main, I do not feel they require defence—you, on the other hand, may consider them indefensible. Having obtained their position through an injustice, they enjoyed that position through privilege. But while they wasted no breath in deprecating an injustice it would not have been to their interest to set right, they did not abuse their privilege—on the whole.

The situation of the Anglo-Irish, intruders in an alien land, is not in itself unnatural. Rather, as Antonia, a character in the much later novel A World of Love, reflects, it is a paradigm of the condition of man. The Anglo-Irish landowners may have had to maintain a "hostile watch" against a potentially rebellious population, yet, after all "everywhere is a frontier" where the "outposted few", the "living" must never be off their guard. One recalls, too, Elizabeth Bowen's comment in The Big House that the struggles of the owners of great Irish houses to maintain themselves were part of a struggle which goes on everywhere and that "may be said, in fact, to be life itself".

Critics' insistence that the Anglo-Irish political crisis is the subject of The Last September and hostile view they sometimes take of the Anglo-Irish themselves tend to drain the novel's events of significance. The people in the book are doomed and irrelevant to the process of political events. Therefore their doings must lack substance and appear only as "aimlessness and malaise". Tempting as it may be to view Danielstown simply as a historical limbo it is a mistake to do so. If the meaning of The Last September is that its characters and actions are nugatory then it hardly seems worthwhile to give them close attention. Critics have chosen instead to emphasize the atmosphere or mood of the novel. Jocelyn Brooke, for example, asserts that what the reader remembers best about The Last September was a "brooding nostalgic melancholy". Such concentration on atmosphere neglects the intellectual meaning of Elizabeth Bowen's work. (In any case the distinction between atmosphere and intellectual meaning is a dubious one with her). Discussion of The Last September in terms of its general mood also neglects the architecture of the novel.

One of the most obvious features of The Last September is its unusually symmetrical structure, the three parts of almost equal length, drawing attention to a design. These divisions and their titles, 'The Arrival of Mr and Mrs Montmorency', 'The Visit of Miss Norton', and 'The Departure of Gerald' unavoidably suggest a pattern rather than simply the ebbs and flows of an empty emotion critics have seen. Elizabeth Bowen's own subsequent comments are also suggestive. She was "most oppressed" by the technical difficulty of "assembling the novel's cast", of bringing the characters to the same place and keeping them there in order "to provide the interplay known as plot". Clearly she thought the interplay important. The encounters and conversations of the novel, above all the choice of just that particular "cast" of characters and of the particular way in which they interact, are meant to be significant. The inner dynamics of The Last September clearly require a much closer attention if its meaning is to be fully elicited.

The second critical preconception about the novel, that the owners of Danielstown are living a false life, "in a vacuum", in fact rests on very little either in the text or in the way of external evidence from Elizabeth Bowen's own comments. The Last September does not endorse that quirk of thinking which has long fascinated social psychologists, and from which historians and political writers enjoy no exemption, of holding the victim responsible for his own ruin. Elizabeth Bowen's opposition to retrospectively seen historical inevitability and the facile and complacent moralising it involves is as obvious in The Last September as it is in her later treatments of the Anglo-Irish decline. The burning of Danielstown is not "death", the result of inevitable internal organic decay, but "execution rather". The book's final description emphasizes violation of the seasons and of the pattern of light and dark. At the burning of the house an "extra day" comes to "abortive birth". The roads run dark through "unnatural dusk" in a landscape which is a crazy "design of order and panic". Those who carry out the burning do so with a cold fanatical assurance, "executioners bland from accomplished duty". A flow of life has been broken. There will be "no more autumns" after this "hard spring darkness". All the visiting and parties of the novel rise to an unnatural climax as the door of the house stands "open hospitably on a furnace". The accent throughout that crucial last passage is on an abrupt ending by superior force of what had been earlier described as the "vital pattern" of expected continuity. Elizabeth Bowen's remark that the novel "from first to last takes its pitch from the month of its name" reinforces this sense of the breaking of a seasonal rhythm as the primary fact of The Last September. The chief point about the Naylors and the life of places like Danielstown is not that they and it were decadent or wilfully blind. It is that they were erased.

It is worth comparing the impression of this final scene with that important earlier passage describing the response of Laurence, Lois's cousin, to the watcher on the mountain, the I.R.A. man looking down at Danielstown. Laurence is aware of force, a "reserve of energy and intention" which "impinges to the point of transformation" on the "pattern below." Force, it is implied, can make or unmake "reality", can change the way in which a pattern of living is perceived, even by those within it. It is the property of overwhelming hostile "energy and intention" to deny not merely the life but the meaning of what they set themselves to destroy. Whatever general historical views the reader may entertain of the Anglo-Irish landowners outside the scope of The Last September, it is impossible to deny that within the novel the Naylors, for all their obvious limitations, are the only example of a fairly happy relationship and a degree of stability. It is as this that they are destroyed, not as the representatives of an unjust social order, the question of whose injustice is not, in any case, the subject of the novel. (This, of course, is not to deny that the Naylors' weaknesses and the weaknesses of the Anglo-Irish position are, incidentally, shown in The Last September. Bowen's Court was later to sum up one of the most salient of them in the remark that the Protestant landowners had "formed a too-grand idea of themselves".)

Elizabeth Bowen accepts the process of history and the destruction it brings about with a matter of factness which critics of her work have not shown. This view of history has to be taken into account in reading The Last September. Although it violates a complex work to name some one theme as its "subject", the book is essentially an exploration of the individual's search for meaning and order at a time of cultural fracture. Apart from their personal significance to the author, the Troubles and the downfall of the Anglo-Irish landowners offer the setting for a peculiarly vivid instance of that displacement of sensibility which has come subsequently to be widely known as the "Modernist Crisis". The focal point of The Last September is not a political crisis or a social upheaval but one of those moments when it becomes obvious that, in Thomas Mann's well-known phrase, "the wisdom of the past has become non-transferable" or in D. H. Lawrence's remark in Kangaroo: "It was in 1915 the old world ended".

One early comment is particularly illuminating. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (February 7, 1929), sedulously adopting the "plain man" standpoint, saw the novel as displaying "too much cleverness" and its story as no more "than a framework for a flickering study of human convolutions", a vision of life as "fundamentally absurd". Although this early reviewer does not develop his perception, his reaction is more authentic than most of the later repeated generalizations about "mood" and "atmosphere". The Last September belongs, with an important part of its vision, to a 1920's preoccupation with the discontinuity of the world, with disorientation and the loss of a communal reality. "Flickering studies of human convulsions", or "visions of life as fundamentally absurd" are irritated but not inaccurate descriptions, from the contemporary conventional point of view, of the work of Proust, Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Although not experimental in form, The Last September has many of the most significant "modernist" hallmarks, especially an emphasis on cultural breakdown, severance from past traditions, the failure or at least inadequacy of communication, the isolation of the individual and the uncertain nature of selfhood. It is typical of such a "Modernist" climate that Marda Norton, for example, should consider that her own experience must be meaningless to Lois, because the individual's relation to life is one of "infinite variation" which

breaks the span of comprehension between being and being and makes an attempt at sympathy the merest fumbling for an outlet along the boundaries of the self.

The Naylors' life and attitudes are presented not as a testimony to some peculiar decadence in the Anglo-Irish landlords but as an example of a 1920's avant-garde truism best known in Virginia Woolf's formulation "On or about December 1910 human character changed". Elizabeth Bowen's subsequent comment merely confirms what the novel itself shows. The Naylors are meant to seem historically dated rather than guilty:

If it seems that Sir Richard and Lady Naylor are snobs with regard to Lois's young officers, recall that the uncle and aunt's ideas dated back to the impeccable years before 1914.

Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse (published two years before The Last September) provides an excellent analogy for the Naylors and their function. Like Virginia Woolf's hostess and homemaker, Sir Richard and his wife have an assured sense of their roles both social and sexual. (Their stability is suggested by, among much else, the Victorian wholesomeness of dreams when "soundly asleep" in a night that rolls over them "thickly and uneventfully"). When her old friend Francie sees Lady Naylor again, after a lapse of years, she sees her as "happier, harder". In her face is a record not of failure but of toughness and coping. Myra Naylor is someone who "goes on with" life, who discharges "the duty of love and pleasure". Like Mrs Ramsay, Lady Naylor stresses the personal rather than the abstract and concentrates on the achieving of pleasant social occasions, and the maintaining of emotional stability. Her view of her own particular historical situation is neither foolish nor incomprehensible. Although cancelled by events, it is not wrong or escapist. Rather it reflects her reliance on the restraints, tolerances and little acts of personal kindness which soften the edges of social and economic systems. The Naylors' fuzziness and vagueness, their deliberate ignoring of provocations and alarms, their agreeable manners and solicitude for their native Irish neighbours (because "it's not a good thing to have made an enemy") prevents lines being drawn too sharply. There is, in fact, some political wisdom in such behavior. Those enjoying privileges or a position others question may help themselves by being personally pleasant. The Naylors are destroyed not by their own lack of perception but by the British parade of naked force, the countryside "altogether too full of soldiers" which shows too clearly the mechanism of society which the tact of Danielstown's owners had helped to disguise. Elizabeth Bowen's own later comment that the Anglo-Irish keeping up of their "orthodox conventional social life", as the Naylors did at Danielstown, seemed "the best thing to do" in circumstances "more tragic than they cared to show" suggests a different interpretation of Sir Richard and his wife from the one adopted by almost all critics of The Last September: (Read in the light of such a comment for example, the early scene in which the "crowd of portraits" reflecting an earlier ease and confidence, give the present inhabitants of Danielstown "a thin, over-bright look" in their "lower cheerfulness, dining and talking" is sympathetic rather than condemnatory. It suggests not some process of historical degeneration but the poignancy of the effort to maintain social life against a threatening background). As Mrs Ramsay's world of elaborate hospitality, of chaos kept at bay by adroit charm, represents an ideal the young cannot accept and do not wish to follow, so the Naylors' delicate scheme of pleasantness, evasion and sociability finds few imitators in a new generation. Mrs Ramsay's and the Naylors' pattern of life are alike in another respect too. Both codes and their representatives are destroyed by sheer force, the brutalities of individual death and the Great War in one case, the Troubles in the other.

Arguably the most original feature of The Last September, and the most suggestive for its author's future development, is the odd angle from which it views the "Modernist Crisis" and cultural deracination. Indeed, the novel's epigraph, from Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé, seems to announce the solution to discontinuity and deracination, to failures of communication between individuals and to the meaninglessness of experiencę, on which the great Modernist works were built. Proust had stated that the materials of art could come "in frivolous pleasures, in idleness …, in unhappiness" and that art, by creating significant harmony from these materials, can redeem them. This could be said to be the faith of Modernism, of Proust, Joyce or Virginia Woolf. It is exemplified by the great and well-known moment in To The Lighthouse when Lily Briscoe completes her painting.

At first sight, it might seem that this "Proustian paradox" (in Hermione Lee's phrase) of tedious, poverty-stricken experience being redeemed by an aesthetic achievement for which tedium has itself provided the materials or the preconditions is to be the ultimate meaning of The Last September. The "Proustian paradox" raises a problem. It clearly does have a significance in Elizabeth Bowen's own life. One might well argue that she is presenting herself as Lois and suggesting that experiences which for her seemed thin at the time will become the novel itself, that the writing of the book comes out of what appeared at a time of "impatience, frivolity or lassitude". However, if one reads The Last September as it stands and without this external autobiographical information the expectation of the "Proustian paradox" is raised only to be challenged. Some support is given for such a reading in Elizabeth Bowen's remark that the novel does deal with "invented happenings, imagined persons" and is "at many, many removes from reality". There is no moment of artistic transcendence for Lois within the novel. Her painting, the conversation with Marda makes clear, is weak and derivative. (She is "cleverer", the older woman apologetically remarks, than her drawings suggest.) The sardonic authorial comment on Lois's writing is even more decisive:

She took all this merciless penetration for maturity.

Any artistic promise she may have remains not only unfulfilled, but unrevealed when the book ends and the "Proustian paradox" has no significance for her, whatever its significance for her creator. Perhaps one should read the epigraph of The Last September more carefully. It comes from that passage in Le Temps Retrouvé where Proust is describing those with an artistic temperament or leanings but who are unwilling to undertake the concentration and labour of creation:

They suffer but their sufferings, like the sufferings of virgins and lazy people, are of a kind that fecundity or work would cure.

The Proustian epigraph offers no possibility of a Modernist aesthetic transcendency but rather emphasizes a peculiar kind of failure, not necessarily permanent or irremediable, but not remedied within the bounds of The Last September.

In order to understand the failure the novel records, it is necessary to look more closely at that structural symmetry already referred to. The opening episode of The Last September is dominated by two factors. The reader is made aware of the difference between the generation of Francie Montmorency and the Naylors and that of Lois and her cousin Laurence. Secondly, attention is drawn to Lois's expectations about her meeting with Mr Montmorency, the object of one of her most important childhood memories. It is at once made clear that some substantial alterations in the quality and nature of personal relationships, the way in which they are conceived and valued, has occurred between one generation and another. The Naylors' and Montmorencys' acquaintance with each other "was an affair of generations". More important, out of this now fading context of stability and habitude, had grown the particular friendship of Myra, Lady Naylor and Francie Montmorency. Francie's feeling for Myra, it is established, grew out of her feeling for the old presence of Danielstown in her consciousness. She had "heard all her life" of its inhabitants before she met them. "There had been no beginning". She has a "sense of return" because of this old family connection, "of having awaited". This security is, it appears, the necessary background to the young womens' enthusiastic discovery of each other. The house "lying secretly at the back" of Francie's mind is the setting for talks "confidential if not alarmingly intimate". This whole past episode connects a certain kind of order with a certain kind of intimacy, both of which are fact vanishing in the present.

Here, the older generations' confidence and readiness to enter into relationships seems to have evaporated. To Laurence and Lois emotional commitments are awkward, embarrassing, even incredible. They are like the debris of the Imperial and Ascendancy past among the Danielstown furniture, including those photographs of reunions "a generation ago" which seems to Lois to give out "a vague depression" from the wall. Laurence sits carefully out of the way on a "not very comfortable" chair because he "dared not go down" for another book, fearing to meet the visitors and have to talk to them. Lois feels a similar unease. She prefers Laurence's cold egocentricity and indifference to "every shade of her personality" to the tender and receptive listeners with whom she feels she has exposed too much of herself. Both cousins share a wariness, a refusal of involvement or commitment. Laurence boasts of having "no emotional life". Lois notes the warm meeting of her aunt and Francie like an anthropologist noting the customs of a remote tribe. She remarks calmly that "There was a good deal of emotion". The opening juxtaposition of Lois and Laurence helps, of course, to broaden the observation of the novel to an affair of generations. Lois's characteristics cannot be seen as mere personal idiosyncrasies or products of her own raw youth.

However, a second and vital point is made in these opening pages of The Last September. While Lois shares Laurence's "post-War" edginess and general lack of confidence in human relations, there is another and contradictory element in her character. Mr Montmorency has been the focus of her "illusions" since she was ten and the reason for this childhood memory, which causes her to be interested in the reunion in spite of her awkwardness, is a curious and symptomatic one. She remembered Hugo, as her mother's guest, falling asleep in the garden in a "perfectly simple exposed way". He seemed without pretence and unlike other visitors who were "noisy at one" as a child. What Lois apparently values is a quality of repose she once thought she detected in her aunt's guest, a "melancholy and exhausted and wise" readiness to be himself, a wholeness of nature which needs no effort or attitudinisings. In fact, Lois is wrong about Hugo Montmorency. What she hoped for in a minor way from meeting him again, however, is what she pursues, much more deeply, in her relationship with Gerald, the possibility of a connection of intellect with instinct, in a life free from self-consciousness and self-division. (It is suggestive that she should recall Hugo's unembarrassed sleeping immediately after her own almost dottily self-conscious reflections on how her fingernails grow inexhaustibly "out of" her and that they are the only part of one's person "of which it is possible to be conscious socially"). Elizabeth Bowen's places Lois firmly in a post-War context in the later Preface to the novel:

World War had shadowed her school days: that was enough—now she wanted order.

The order which Lois wants, involves an emotional and personal stability, even more than a social one. Yet such a desire, it is plain, must involve a placing of the self in a social context for which neither Lois nor her cousin Laurence appear to have the desire or the confidence.

Hugo Montmorency, through his relationship to the Naylors and to Laura, Lois's dead mother, introduces another significant factor into the book's design. The dimension of past events is insisted upon for various reasons. One of the most important of these is that figures in the present, such as Lois or Laurence, and the emotional and cultural climate which they represent have, we are meant to see a context in the choices or refusals of the previous generation. The "Modernist Crisis" is the result, not of a sudden cataclysmi, but of a number of complex processes, some of which are typified in the lives of Hugo and Francie and in Hugo's early decision to sell his property. At first sight, Hugo's conduct might have seemed that of a realist, one who has read a historical situation aright and salvaged something from the downfall of the Anglo-Irish landowners. Surely it was better to have sold his house Rockriver long before the Troubles, rather than to have hung on, like the Naylors, until Danielstown was burned. Yet, the novel early makes clear, what purported to be sensible, a making of his peace with circumstances, was, in fact, ignoble, an uprooting and a destruction of some part of Hugo's life from which it has never really recovered. Francie, with "a delicate woman's strong feeling for 'naturalness'" always blamed herself for not having dissuaded him from the sale. She had been pained by his lack of feeling for his home "as by an expression of irreligion". "Religion" and "nature" are strong and challenging terms. They insist uncompromisingly, and in a novel otherwise so aware of the Modernist climate, so unfashionably, on the real value of the home, the family past, the pieties of ancestry. Even if, for some reason, they are impossible to get or to keep, these are the essential preconditions of emotional health. Hugo sells Rockriver not, we are to believe, from a wise and necessary yielding to historical processes but because "he had expected little of life". This chosen homelessness and resulting debility of the Montmorencys is emphasized by their weak notion of buying a bungalow somewhere which is then as weakly abandoned. Hugo's uprooting of himself has prepared the way for the self-pitying anticlimax of his later life, a "net of small complications" without the dignity of tragedy. Especially, it explains the emotional failure of his marriage to Francie. Since "they had no house" and Francie "no vocation", they have drifted about, Hugo steering his wife into the role of a permanent invalid. The closest part of their marital bond seems to be his nightly combing out of her hair. (Hugo and Francie are, of course, one of many other instances of displacement and deracination resulting in emotional damage in Elizabeth Bowen's work. One recalls the way in which the rootlessness of Theodora Thirdman's parents in Friends and Relations is linked to her own disastrous emotional development or the context given to Robert's betrayal of his country in The Heat of the Day in the impermanence of his family home, Holme Dene, a house like a stage set, practically always for sale).

If we are meant to compare the older and younger generation in The Last September we are equally meant to compare the two specimens of the older generation itself. The Naylors and their real, if conventional, happiness take on another light when compared with the choices their contemporaries the Montmorencys have made. Myra, who would not have her husband "otherwise" has made a better bargain, within the limits of the established duties of family and position, than her friend Francie has with a husband who has drifted away from them. Hugo's failure is, significantly, twofold. It involved the sale of his home and the choice of a wandering life spent largely in hotels. Also, and equally important, was his failure to love Laura, Lois's mother, no doubt a difficult woman, but one whose restlessness had been an "irradiation" as he recalls years later. This earlier betrayal of love, linked to the failure to establish one's life, is echoed and amplified in the second generation, in Lois.

The background of Hugo's failure, and his vanity, posturing and self-deception throughout The Last September undermines the "wisdom" of his view of the Anglo-Irish dilemma, whatever its apparent plausibility. His answer to Marda's question about the Troubles, "Will there ever be anything we can all do except not notice?" is to deny any point or meaning to the Anglo-Irish. Their collective personality is merely "a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside it". Marda Norton's response to this pseudo-omniscience, this moral and emotional bankruptcy masquerading as maturity, defines the spiritual landscape of The Last September with peculiar accuracy:

But the hold of the country was that she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted. Or seemed so—"Like Shakespeare", she added more vaguely, "or isn't it?"

She half recollects, is dimly aware, of some universe of moral discourse in which instincts are their own arguments, or rather need no arguments. Love of land, of family, home or country cannot be rationally defended against a determinedly nihilistic scepticism any more than can the moral pieties or imperatives of Shakespeare's tragedies or histories. Such pieties are simply, in life as they are in Shakespeare, the bases and the perameters of a human existence. Marda's vague half-awareness, her sliding away from her own perception, shows that she knows this but cannot hold onto her knowledge. This little exchange, itself an epitome of Elizabeth Bowen's management throughout the novel of undeveloped communications and abortive arguments, suggest the presence of needs which cannot be satisfied, because they cannot be articulated, as Marda here, somehow, lacks the will to state them.

Hugo Montmorency's languid and somewhat precious nihilism, redolent of the fin de siécle, is a reminder that the crisis of meaning and order, of relationships and communication, which lies behind The Last September has been developing for many years. The opening of the novel presents two lines of approach, the realization of a gap between the generations in their perceptions and emotions and, by contrast, the sense of historical and psychological processes which link the generations in an unfolding development. The choice between the stability and "despairing optimism" of Lady Naylor and Hugo's narcissism and surrender was an earlier and simpler picture of the problems which in Lois's life have become more intractable. The suggestion is made that at least part of the climate of the 1920's was created by earlier abandonings of hope, and lack of energy and purpose, veiling themselves, as in Hugo's case by a pretence of superior sensitivity and refinement.

One of the most subtle and amusing facets of this unfolding of tendencies in The Last September is illustrated by Hugo's encounters with Laurence. It is clear that nihilism in the mode of Maeterlinck does not care for nihilism in the mode of Aldous Huxley. It is also clear that the two are connected. (The affinity between Laurence and the boorish intellectuals in Huxley's recent novels was noted by the Times Literary Supplement reviewer). Hugo is offended by Laurence's clever conversation and asks, as an attempted snub, "Are you the undergraduate of today?" The "overfine machinery" of his own mind revolts from the details of living but, in the manner of his generation, prefers "manly talk" as a refuge rather than "articulate" cynicism. Marda Norton, however, tells Laurence that he is in danger of growing up into another version of Mr Montmorency.

Laurence himself notices the affinity, detecting the fact that Hugo "hated parties and conversation" as much as he did but was less "adept" at avoiding them or less fierce in honouring "the virginity of the intelligence". When asked by Marda Norton what he thinks about Lois, Hugo is about to reply that he is "no good at people" but refrains because "he reminded himself of Laurence". Hugo's stance is an 1890's melancholy fastidiousness. He is like a less successful member of the "Souls":

His nostrils contracted slightly as though the smell drawn up from the roots of the grass … were more offensive than he cared to explain.

In Laurence, the facade of sensitivity has been dispensed with and the underlying misanthropy and egocentricity he shares with Hugo has become obvious. Where Hugo and those of his generation who shared his pose affected a flaccid ennui, Laurence is briskly malicious, exaggerating his Bloomsbury-like patter "his vein of third or fourth quality", or bringing up Hugo's failure to settle in Canada in order to needle the older man.

Hugo is (mentally) unfaithful to his wife Francie, or almost worse, to the memory of Laura, Lois's mother. Once recollections of her had filled the valley through which he walks with Marda but now "he and she might never have come here; they were disowned". The rocks are "transmuted" by his new found, or fancied, love for his new companion, who, comically, finds him unsympathetic and is even exasperated "past caution" with him. All Hugo's "unordered moods" are merely sentimentalisings of his own egotism:

He loved her; a sense of himself rushed up, filling the valley.

Laurence, and those of the younger generation he typifies, need no such romantic clothing for their selfishness. Where Hugo used women for private fantasies, without ever really knowing or caring about them, Laurence discards them altogether, regarding Hugo as one who "had given away his integrity, had not even a bed to himself". It is interesting too, to notice affinities between Laurence and Francie, Hugo's wife. Neither of them, we are told, wanted to know "how anyone was" at the tennis party, or what they thought or wanted, but while Francie is all tremulous sensibility on the surface and egocentric beneath, Laurence is simply egocentric.

It may seem that too much may be read into Laurence's would-be clever chatter and cynicism. Is there really more in them than in those of many tiresome or pretentious undergraduates? A partial answer to the question is to consider Laurence's place in the scheme of The Last September. He clearly offers a contrast with Gerald, Lois's fiancé, as the important passage which juxtaposes the two young men's view of what civilization consists makes plain. At the same time, Laurence, as has been suggested, represents a continuation to a point of graceless absurdity of the selfishness and narcissism of the previous generation. What Laurence and the other characters around Lois are intended to embody is that "shape" which Elizabeth Bowen was later to describe as "the important thing". The juxtapositions, oppositions and developments between persons and generations in The Last September fulfils her later pronouncement that "in a novel every action or word on the part of any one of the characters has meaning … and the whole trend of the story suggests direction". Each member of the small, carefully chosen "cast" of The Last September has a cultural significance, a representational quality Laurence's elevation of his own refusal to know, or to be interested in, others into a sign of superior intelligence ("I never can conceive of anybody else's mentality") is to be judged against Elizabeth Bowen's constant preoccupation with the individual's duty to society. The ability of people to talk to each other in pleasant and easy ways, the capacity to like one's kind and to want to find out about them are indices of psychological health in the individual and cultural health in a society. Laurence anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's fuller treatment of the intellectual who betrays the duties of human sympathy, St Quentin in The Death of the Heart. In fact, Laurence and St Quentin both offer the same manifesto of aloofness, in almost the same words.

More significantly, the view civilization which Laurence is made to hold is not some trivial, purely personal affair. It is the epitome of the rationalist, hedonist "progressive" 1920's thinking of which, no doubt, Elizabeth Bowen was fully aware when she was writing The Last September. This was a period, she remarked, when "Civilization (a word constantly on my 1928 lips) was now around me". Laurence's view of civilization as "an unemotional kindness withering to assertion selfish or racial; silence cold with a comprehension in which the explaining clamour died away" recalls the ambience of Lytton Strachey or of Bertrand Russell's popular writings, among so many others.

It is an ideal to which Elizabeth Bowen is as merciless as D. H. Lawrence had been while adopting at the same time a much calmer and more matter of fact tone. She agrees with Lawrence's perception of the sterility, even suppressed hatred, behind the "progressive" ideals of the day. Under the rationalism and civilized irony of Lois's cousin lies the desire for "a faceless and beautiful negation", an end of "art, of desire" as well as of battle, effectively for a kind of death. The novel underlines this point elsewhere in Laurence's daydreams about violent destruction, his longing to "be here when this house burns" or for the arrival of the raiders whose non-appearance "pricked his egotism". In that curious passage, informed with the new psychological preoccupations of the period, which describes his fantasizing when unable to go to sleep it becomes clear that what Laurence enjoys is a frivolous mental manipulation of his relations and acquaintances, placing them, for his amusement, in imaginary scenarios, remaking marriages. Superficially amusing, it is a somewhat chilling passage suggesting Laurence's indifference to, even dislike, of people and relationships which actually exist. In superficial contrast Hugo "sets up a stage for himself" where, "divorced from fact and probability", he can indulge in erotic day-dreams about Marda. Underneath the romantic trappings and self-deception ("and if this were not love") there is a substantial similarity with Laurence in Hugo's manipulations of "power disconnected with life".

If it is interesting to see Laurence and his type as a continuation and development of the predilections of people like Hugo Montmorency, it is essential to see Lois in relation to her family past. Hugo's account of Laura, the dead girl's mother, may, perhaps must, be coloured by his unsatisfactory relationship with her, but there are striking likenesses between what we learn of the dead woman and what we see of her daughter. Like Lois, in her own way, Laura had "wanted her mind made up" by a relationship with a man. This Hugo felt unable to do for her: "I had enough to do with my own mind". In any case, she was never "real" in the way that he wanted. Her endless talk was a camouflage, he felt, for a wish to avoid personal contact or being known. If she thought he had succeeded in knowing she would "start a crying fit". Her throwing of herself into a marriage with Farquar, Lois's father, was an impulsive and muddled affair, completed before she "had time to get out of it". Her subsequent unhappy life gave her something concrete to be miserable about. Hugo's waspish recollections contain a substantial truth about the externals of Laura's behaviour, although he makes no attempt to understand the inner reasons for her actions. Hugo's version of these external details is confirmed when Sir Richard applies the very phrase to Lois which Hugo had used to describe her mother:

She was just like Laura, poor Laura's own child in fact; she would talk and talk and you never knew where you had her.

The existence in her dead mother of a kind of prototype for Lois and an earlier version of some of the problems she faces might be a way of making the simple point that Lois has inherited something of her temperament. More than this is involved however. Laura's uncertainty about her role had fed those "epic rages", which Laurence remembered "against Hugo, against Richard against any prospect of life at all". The bitter quarrels, the "eroding companionship" with Hugo, to whom Laura was attracted but whose unresponsive nature could not provide what she needed, bred a "confusion which clotted up the air" of Laura's life. She raged impotently, scrawling "with passion" an insulting drawing of Hugo whose failure to marry was, in Lady Naylor's view part of his general "way of avoiding things". Finally, in her frustration, she "hotly" went North to marry Mr Farquar "the rudest man in Ulster". In these fragmentary references to her enough of Laura's character has been preserved to suggest an intelligent, spirited woman, reacting against the sentimental and limited role imposed on her sex, as in her abrasive rejection of "being loved" and gushed over by Miss Part, Lois's governess. We are reminded, however, that she belonged to a different world from the one Lois inhabits and a simpler. In Laurence's recollection the "dated" quality of Laura's impulsive marriage is what is emphasized. She

buttoned a tight sleek dress of that day's elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics)

before embarking on her despairing flight. In its late romantic melodrama, such a scene belongs to the same world as Hugo's melancholy sensitivity, or Lady Naylor's sleeping when young and a "rebel" with a copy of Shelley's poems under her pillow.

The comparison which the reader is invited to draw between Lois and her mother is a vital part of the novel's historical dimension, a reinforcement of the sense, fundamental to The Last September, of changes in moral feeling and emotional response. Essentially the changes are in the direction of a greater complexity where the confidence to make even the wholehearted, if disastrous, gestures Laura made in the 1890's has been sapped. Lois recognizes that she is "twice as complex" as the older generation, because of the multiplicity of elements which have gone into her making. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of the passing of time, like a ship "rushing" onwards. The fact that she will penetrate "thirty years deeper" into it than her uncle, her aunt and than Hugo who "belonged" to their world, enhances Lois's awareness of "mystery and destination".

Lois looks in three directions in order to find answers to the problems raised by her apprehensions, needs and expectations of living. The tripartite division of The Last September corresponds to the three fields of her quest. In the novel's first section she is shown turning her eyes at the past, at Mr Montmorency, the lover who had failed her mother. Hugo's desertion of Laura and the resulting marriage to Farquar brought about Lois's birth and the identity with which she finds it so hard to cope. It might well seem that her problems might be clarified, if not solved, by going back into the past where they originated. Hugo, the missed possibility in her mother's life, is the missed possibility in her own, since he was the father she did not have. The journey back into the past is a frequently used narrative device, with its own mythic power. However, it is Elizabeth Bowen's purpose to raise the possibility of such a narrative line, or personal quest, only to disappoint it. She suggests an obvious and pleasing way in which The Last September might develop and then deliberately balks expectation. Hugo possesses none of that repose with which Lois's childhood memory had endowed him and for which she herself is seeking. He is vain, restless and self-deluding. Almost at once, on meeting him, she recognizes that though he was so subtle he "would not take the trouble to understand her". When he does look at her, it is with a cold, bored intelligence, superficially perceptive, actually dismissive:

He supposed that unformed, anxious to make an effort, she would marry early.

It is, of course, a sound enough assumption, since she almost does. Hugo, however, is judging Lois by the choices and limitations available in his own generation and exemplified in the action of her mother Laura, the woman he emotionally betrayed.

If the past, incarnated in Hugo, has nothing to offer or to teach, it is natural to assume that one must look towards the future. The second section of The Last September, accordingly, is built round the visit of Marda Norton to Danielstown. Marda's stay, and its effect on Lois, represent a second aborted narrative possibility, a second potent myth deliberately discarded. If one cannot explore and redeem the past, then one can discard its elaborate and outworn claims and face the world in a spirit of "existential choice" (before the name), of rational unencumbered freedom.

Marda is introduced as a disrupter of social ease through her accidents and gaucheries on previous occasions at Danielstown. Her first effect on Lois is to accelerate the girl's emancipation from romantic illusions of the past in general and Hugo, in particular, through her open derision of him as a man married to a woman old enough to be his mother. In other ways, too, Marda's "sophistication opened further horizons to Lois". The new woman of the 1920's, she has shed the "feminine" sweetness of Francie and the assiduous charm of Lady Naylor along with "feminine pearshape". She watches and assesses others, challenging their "integrity" and the sincerity of their social postures from "the stronghold of her indifference". By these astringent standards, Hugo is quickly disposed of. She treats his infatuation with her as an irrelevant nuisance which does not concern her in the least.

In Lois's first fairly lengthy conversation with Marda, however, the younger woman quickly detects an underlying insecurity beneath the surface elegance and ease. Lois's attitude changes in this encounter. She starts from admiration of Marda's "inimitable deftness" with her make-up, those casual gestures which, like Stella's as seen by Harrison in The Heat of the Day, are the outward tokens of a "brilliant life". Lois yearns to purchase a place in the memory of this distinguished being even at the cost of the burning of the house in "one scarlet night". The room in which they sit seems, like Lois's own existence, hopelessly devalued, full of the "dusk of oblivion", compared with the nature promise of Marda's forthcoming marriage. However, the turning point in their talk comes quickly and decisively. Lois attempts, in a long passage, left in reported speech perhaps to suggest its breathlessness and incoherence, to explain her need "to go wherever the war hadn't", to travel "alone", to look at sights "unprepared" and "unadmonished". Her daydreams, although inchoate, involve a reaction against wartime restrictions but even more, a revolt against the limited role of women, "of being not noticed because she is a lady", a demand for wider experience. Marda's reply reveals that her emancipation is superficial. She advises Lois not to "expect to be touched or changed—or to be in anything that you do". The comment is "unwisdom" since, in a somewhat cryptic but telling authorial phrase, it lacks "the sublimer banality". In order to live, one must have an appetite for living, a hopefulness or idealism prepared to risk sounding naive or banal. This Marda, in spite of her poise and air of independence, does not possess. When Lois tries to explain that she wants to be "in a pattern", to be "related", her companion immediately sees this in the narrow formalized terms of being "a wife and mother". Marda's praise of this "traditional" feminine role is vitiated by her own adoption of it out of a search for financial security and in a weary spirit of "we can always be women".

Lois, watching the deferential stoop of the older woman's head, as she writes to her fiancé Leslie Lawe, thinks "how anxious to marry Marda must really be" and "her distantness and her quick, rejecting air must be a false effect". This intimation about Marda's deliberate choice of the conventional role out of mere expedience, does not, at once, form a final verdict on her in Lois's mind. The delay in Lois's reaction is one of the characteristic subtleties in Elizabeth Bowen's writing. Rather (and this is surely more true to the way in which individuals do perceive each other) Lois's insight remains, beneath many pleasant and interesting exchanges, to surface again, after the failure of her relationship with Gerald, in a poignant complaint:

Even Marda—nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn't stayed, she goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself so damned funny—it's cheap, really.

Marda's modishly tough and disengaged manner is as deceptive as Laurence's Bloomsbury "civilization". Embracing the future with Miss Norton is no more of an answer than disentangling the past with Hugo.

One of the most curious features of The Last September is the significance of events which do not happen. Indeed what does not take place (but very well might have done) is as important as what actually does. The novel propounds the features of the crisis familiar in Modernist literature, the abrupt break in the pattern of history, the loss of confidence in the autonomous personality, the discontinuity of the self and the uncertainty of its contact with the outside world, the failure of social contact and communication. Where The Last September differs from other books which examine this crisis is partly in its diagnosis of the problem and partly in what seems a resolute refusal of the solutions most commonly offered. The most popular of these, the aesthetic transcendence of chaos, the solution of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To The Lighthouse, is emphatically rejected, by disallowing Lois artistic talent and success. More traditional solutions, the search and understanding of the past or the open-eyed facing of the future are denied with equal force.

There remains one final solution, that of synthesis, the possibility that a split culture or a splintered vision of reality may be healed by the joining through love of rival and originally incompatible visions. Perhaps the best known example of such a synthesis is E. M. Forster's enterprise in Howards End. Lois's relationship with Gerald clearly does have resonance far beyond that of a purely personal love affair. To the shattered Daventry, it is primarily Gerald's youth that is striking. He looks across a gulf at "our young friend", and his capacity for hope. In Lady Naylor's view, however, "no amount of experience shook these young Englishmen up". Gerald is primarily a study in the success and failure of training, in the nature of the public school product. His conditioning is thorough, an imbibing of simple healthy sentimental images, of the ideal life as

a fixed leisured glow, and relaxation, as on coming in to tea from an afternoon's gardening with his mother in autumn.

At first sight in such passages and others, we seem to be being offered a version of E. M. Forster's critique of the "undeveloped heart" of the English professional and middle-class. However, one has only to think of Gerald Dawes in The Longest Journey, of Ronnie in A Passage to India or even of the Wilcoxes in Howards End to realize that a satirical intention is not predominant in the portrait of Gerald in The Last September. Instead, one might even view him as a recapitulation of some Forsterian material from a non-Forsterian standpoint, as a partial answer or alternative to that "unfairness" with which, a few years later, Elizabeth Bowen suggested Forster had treated "half his cast in A Passage to India".

Gerald is unfailingly amiable. Betty Vermont's description of him as "so absolutely nice-minded" is sustained by his behaviour throughout the novel. The key incident in his severance from Lois is caused not by an instance of insensitivity but by one of mistaken chivalry and decency. He refrains from making a physical response to her appeal, which might have saved the situation. He does this, however, not out of lack of feeling but because he earlier promised Lady Naylor not to try to kiss her. Lois feels not so much that she is the victim of emotional shallowness or refusal to feel as of a refusal to see her as she really is. She tells Gerald "I don't believe you know what I'm like a bit". Some idea he has formed of her remains "inaccessible to her" and she cannot affect it. He, for his part, is convinced that "his darling Lois … had no idea what she was".

Comparison is one of the most significant devices in The Last September. The reader is meant to infer meaning by the carefully placed moral and historical juxtapositions of Lots and Laura, the Montmorencies and the Naylors, Gerald and Laurence, and Laurence and Hugo. Among the less obvious, but nevertheless useful, of these comparisons is that of Lois and Gerald with Livvy and David. What the contrast of Lois's love relationship with that of her much simpler friend, whom she suddenly outgrows and drops, is that Lois has a much more complex organization. She reveals a need to express, to explore and to understand her own needs. Her conception of love is, like her conception of herself, one which rejects the premature closing down of the development of feeling and of mutual emotional exploration. Gerald's reserve is, on the contrary, a matter of "convenience", undeserving of the "sensitive reverence with which such a quality is apt to be treated". He avoids emotional communication because it embarrasses, not because it is too sacred to discuss. Lois was Gerald's

integrity of which he might speak to strangers but of which to her he would never speak.

There is obviously a serious defect in the training which prevents a lack of emotional articulacy, even though such a lack is not the final truth about Gerald.

Lois's predicament is not specifically an Anglo-Irish one. Rather it is, in considerable part, the product of the need felt by some women for a less stereotyped role, for a freer and more open way of feeling, for a greater respect for the individual identity. Lois feels the need for "some incalculable shifting of perspectives that would bring him wholly into focus, mind and spirit" before she can wholeheartedly love him. For her, love must involve a communion of intelligences, a growth of understanding not simply a meeting of instincts, of "unclothed" emotion where a kiss is "an impact with inside blankness". It is, perhaps, this refusal to accept that instinct can be all in all which caused Jocelyn Brooke to note a cerebral quality in Elizabeth Bowen's description of sexual feeling.

However there is a contradiction at the heart of Lois's problem. While she desires the openness to development, the avoidance of some narrow role as Gerald's "lovely woman", she does at the same time, desire "something beyond sensation", a "quiet beyond experience", a kind of wholeness and calm which exists beyond the "little twists of conversation all knotted together". It is a misreading of her relationship with Gerald to ignore her own persistent sense of being "lonely", without a future, "ruled out", of lacking the stability such a love might bring. Besides, the reader's awareness that the inability of Lois to love Gerald is a failure is sharpened by the existence in the novel of a wider context of rootlessness and refusal to feel, deepening from Hugo's generation to Laurence's. It is also worth giving weight to Elizabeth Bowen's later remark that Lois "touches the margins of tragedy, not in Gerald's death, but in her failure to love".

However, no external evidence is needed since the text makes it clear that Lois chooses to abandon the possibilities of this love and supplies her motive for doing so. When all is allowed for Gerald's limitations and for Lady Naylor's interference (well meant according to her lights, since she wishes to spare Lois the poverty she foresees for Livvy), it is Lois who cannot bring herself to make the choice, which, like all choice, contains some sacrifice. In a crucial incident she overhears her aunt and Mrs Montmorency discussing her relationship with Gerald. Lois is aware of the disadvantages of marrying to a woman:

Love, she had learnt to assume, was the mainspring of womens' grievances.

(The parenthesis is significant, of course, because it implies that some of these disadvantages may be subjective and ignores any possible gains). The overheard conversation proceeds and Lois is about to hear Mrs Montmorency make some definite statement about her. This Lois cannot bear. "She didn't want to know what she was" since she feels "such knowledge would finish one". The rejection of final self-knowledge is linked here with the rejection of the confinement, as it's seen, of a relationship.

The Last September nowhere pretends that Gerald does not have very obvious limitations. However, in a superb passage, Elizabeth Bowen underlines the fact that, in rejecting love, even with its attendant restrictions, Lois has denied herself the chance of understanding herself and of achieving some final fruition. Lois bangs her water-jug about in her basin to draw attention to her presence and stop the two women talking. In this she succeeds.

It was victory. Later on, she noticed a crack in the basin, running between a sheaf and an cornucopia; a harvest richness to which she each day bent down her face. Every time, before the water clouded, she would see the crack: every time she would wonder: what Lois was—She would never know.

The image is an apt suggestion of the failure of any "harvest richness" in Lois's own life. The last sentence of the chapter is ominous with its implication of some definite and final turning away, some willed refusal. There will, indeed, be no more Septembers.

This sense of refusal is reinforced later when Gerald utters words which have a "solemn echo", "You know I'd die for you". In Lois's mind these words evoke the high arches of a church, where the young pair are to be married. What he says has too a "warmth and weight" and a "quiet" as though "for many nights he had been sleeping beside her". It is the promise of a bond, a progress to stability and peace, "beyond experience", perhaps because nothing in her experience affords evidence for what she yet nevertheless intuitively senses is possible and which she desires. Then, with a deliberate baldness, and a bleakness, unexplained here but perhaps explained by the breaking of the "Golden Bowl", the novel states the fact of her refusal:

But she turned away from some approach in his look.

What Gerald had said and what Lois had felt is proof of the existence of words of power, offers, promises, or kinds of loyalty which bind individuals to each other and on which "quiet" can be built. What Gerald had offered was significantly different from the "future" envisaged by Marda or Laurence or the "past" incarnated in Hugo. In a final scene with her cousin, Lois tentatively admits the existence of a range of feeling from which she has chosen to exclude herself Laurence comes to Lois in the garden of Danielstown after Daventry has brought the news of Gerald's death. She explains that she is "just thinking". This seems to be a mood Laurence can understand, in which by a process of reflection one can reach a kind of indifference or detachment where everything appears relative, without ultimate meaning or value and at last without power to hurt. This is the consolation he promises Lois:

I think I should, I expect—I don't know—one probably gets past things.

Lois replies that "there are things one can't get past", meaning Gerald's love of her and of his country: "At least, I don't want to". Laurence, perhaps out of politeness, agrees, "studying, with an effort of sight and comprehension, some unfamiliar landscape". Gerald's fumbling sense that Laurence's earlier idea of civilization reflected "a wrongness that was the outcome of too much thinking" receives a posthumous confirmation.

If one gives due weight to this exchange, our last glimpse of Lois, then it signifies an affirmation of certain values. These values had been preserved in a fossilised form by the Naylors, before being engulfed by historical change. They had been denied by the modern consciousness, developing from Hugo to Laurence. They are values which, it appears, survive their association with Gerald's naivety and emotional immaturity, his young man's awareness of Lois's needs and feelings at a time when women's image and expectations were changing.

The Last September has many titles to distinction but perhaps the greatest use of them is its handling of a complex moral and emotional problem. This problem, born of longstanding cultural change, now sharpened by war and social upheaval, is, essentially the conflict between the claims of development and those of stability. Lois is a microcosm of that conflict, to which Elizabeth Bowen returns in her later novels, and which is, perhaps, their essential subject. The "creation of atmosphere", or the evocation of minute notations of feeling for which she is celebrated are, in fact, subordinate to a far more striking quality in The Last September, that of a judicious moral assessment which treats every feature of a problem with scrupulous fairness, combined with a tough-mindedness which does not attempt to suggest that there is some compromise in which every incompatible good can be combined. As the rootless Stella finds in The Heat of the Day, the stability of Mountmorris had its price. There is no easy answer. In The Last September, current solutions to the "Modernist" crisis of meaning, having been tried and found wanting, another choice was left. It again was not without its price, one which Lois was unwilling to pay. However, The Last September does not enforce a sense of futility so much as that of an unanswered question. It can claim the giving of that sense of "direction" which Elizabeth Bowen, later offered as one of the reasons she wrote:

Even stories which end in the air, which are comments on and pointers to futility imply that men and women are too good for the futility in which they are involved.