Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel & the Child
To read Elizabeth Bowen is to enter, both with pleasure and with consternation, the world of the Anglo-Irish: that spiritually hyphenated class which has all but vanished from Ireland since the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the foundation of the Republic. As a British Protestant ruling class which owned land taken by force from the Irish Catholic population, the Anglo-Irish were always, from the sixteenth century on, to some degree rootless and insecure in the country they governed. But the Land Wars and legislation of the late nineteenth century set into motion forces that would soon deprive the Protestant land-owning classes of whatever raison d'être they had. By the time Bowen was born in 1899, the shadows of what Mark Bence-Jones has called, in his 1987 book of the same name, the "Twilight of the Ascendancy," had already lengthened dramatically.
Though she spent most of her adult life in England, and London is in some ways the center of her fictional world, Elizabeth Bowen was the daughter of a County Cork "big house" called Bowen's Court, which she inherited and, unable to afford its upkeep on her earnings as a writer, eventually had to sell in 1959. She was born into a Protestant Ascendancy that rose to power and distinction in the eighteenth century and went into decline by the late nineteenth. Comparisons to the planter aristocracy of the American South are roughly, but only roughly, apt. The alienation of the Anglo-Irish landowner, set above and isolated from the "native" population, is a vantage point to which Bowen refers often when writing of Ireland. "I have grown up," she writes in her essay "The Big House" (1940), "accustomed to seeing out of my windows nothing but grass, sky, tree, to being enclosed in a ring of almost complete silence and to making journeys for anything that I want."
Visiting these houses today as a guest or a tourist, one feels the uncanny accuracy with which Bowen captures the strangeness emanating from these gray limestone piles, Palladian or neo-Gothic, set starkly against the primal green of the Irish countryside:
Each house seems to live under its own spell, and that is the spell that falls on the visitor from the moment he passes in at the gates. The ring of woods inside the demesne wall conceals, at first, the whole demesne from the eye: this looks, from the road, like a bois dormant, with a great glade inside. Inside the gates the avenue often describes loops, to make itself of still more extravagant length; it is sometimes arched by beeches, sometimes silent with moss. On each side lie those tree-studded grass spaces we Anglo-Irish call lawns and English people puzzle us by speaking of as "the park." On these browse cattle, or there may be horses out on the grass. A second gate—(generally white-painted, so that one may not drive into it in the dark)—keeps these away from the house in its inner circle of trees. Having shut this clanking white gate behind one, one takes the last reach of avenue and meets the faded, dark-windowed and somehow hypnotic stare of the big house. Often a line of mountains rises above it, or a river is seen through a break in woods. But the house, in its silence, seems to be contemplating the swell or fall of its own lawns.
The sense of the house "contemplating" its surroundings is pure Bowen—one of many instances of a house as a living entity: an Irish house or just any house. In her novel The House in Paris (1949), she writes: "The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house." Just how remote, how starved for company, the houses must have seemed when their day had passed can be gathered from the opening sentences of The Last September (1929):
About six o'clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out of a net of shadow down the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreen Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency produced—arms waving and a wild escape to the wind of her mauve motor veil—an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised visitors.
Many of the Anglo-Irish found it convenient to forget how they came by their land in the first place. In Bowen's Court (1942, revised 1964), her classic family history, and elsewhere, Elizabeth Bowen does not shy away from admitting that her original Welsh ancestor (the name Bowen derives from the Welsh ap Owen, "son of Owen") was granted land taken from the defeated Irish owners as booty from Oliver Cromwell's campaign to put down the rebellion of the 1640s. At the same time she makes a positive claim for the value of the country-house culture founded by people of her class. This culture, molded in the age of Gandon and Swift and Burke, retained in its architecture and its literary style the clean lines of classicism. And Bowen saw in big-house life, too, a ritualistic element that was practically religious. How the housemaid Matchett, in The Death of the Heart (1938), prepares for the night in the London establishment that she serves is informed by her English country-house training:
About now [i.e., about 10:30 P.M.], she served the idea of sleep with a series of little ceremonials—laying out night clothes, levelling fallen pillows, hospitably opening up the beds. Kneeling to turn on bedroom fires, stooping to slip bottles between sheets, she seemed to abase herself to the overcoming night. The impassive solemnity of her preparations made a sort of an altar of each bed: in big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element.
As its last owner, Elizabeth Bowen describes her house, built in 1776, as "a high bare Italianate house" and elsewhere as a "great bare block," "severely classical." Like Newbridge in County Dublin, Castle Ward in County Down, the ruin of Tyrone House in County Galway, and many another Irish big house, Bowen's Court, which was pulled down in 1960, was an austere rectangle of limestone that dominated the landscape from its imposing elevation. "After an era of greed, roughness and panic, after an era of camping in charred or desolate ruins (as my Cromwellian ancestors did certainly), these new settlers who had been imposed on Ireland," she writes in "The Big House," "began to wish to add something to life. The security that they had, by the eighteenth century, however ignobly gained, they did not use quite ignobly. They began to feel, and exert, the European idea—to seek what was humanistic, classic and disciplined."
For the full flavor of the Anglo-Irish in their ridin', fishin,' and shootin' prime, the reader should turn to the two cousins who published from 1889 to 1949 under the names Somerville & Ross (Edith Somerville continued to regard Martin Ross—the pseudonym of Violet Martin—as a collaborator even beyond the latter's death in 1915). Somerville & Ross picture an Anglo-Irish ruling class characterized by vigor, sangfroid, eccentricity, and a habit of command, at ease with their neighbors among the native Irish. This is a world where a favorite hunting dog wipes his muddy paws on a priceless Oriental rug, where the squire goes on a tear with the poacher. As portrayed in the stories brought together in collections like Experiences of an Irish R.M., the Anglo-Irish played a vital role in their adopted country. The Resident Magistrate of Somerville & Ross's stories adjudicated—often with hilarious results—the disputes of the Catholic majority, while other members of this group functioned in the economy as large farmers, bankers, merchants, and administrators. The never less than outspoken Edith Somerville reprimanded her brother, who had written her that he had come to regard himself as English: "Nonsense about being 'English'! I don't mind if you say 'British' if you like…. My family has eaten Irish food and shared Irish life for nearly three hundred years, and if that doesn't make me Irish I might as well say I was Scotch, or Norman, or Pre-Diluvian!"
The attenuation and malaise one feels among Bowen's characters springs, historically, from the growing isolation of the Anglo-Irish in an Ireland increasingly bent on controlling its own destiny and increasingly successful in moving toward that goal. Only four years after Bowen was born, the Wyndham Act—engineered by George Wyndham, Chief Secretary of Ireland at the turn of the century—was passed, enabling landlords to sell their farms to their tenants in transactions financed by the government, with an added Bonus of 12 percent paid by the British Treasury. By 1914 three-fourths of the former tenants had bought the lands they farmed, leaving landlords with only their big houses and a few hundred acres of surrounding land. This put them in the position of being (relatively) rich men living in islands of leisure, with no useful function in the country. "The story is told," writes Mark Bence-Jones, "of how when Wyndham was walking through one of the gaming rooms at Monte Carlo a few years after the passing of his Act, he was greeted by an Irish peer of his acquaintance who pointed to the large pile of counters in front of him and said gratefully: "'George, George, the Bonus!'"
I would not want to claim that such irresponsible attitudes toward the ownership of property in a poor country were typical: in landed or monied classes the socially responsible and the scrupulous always co-exist cheek by jowl with the callous and the profligate. The Last September, set in 1920 during the Troubles of that period, is Bowen's most sustained look at the predicament of Anglo-Irish big-house people—caught between the nationalist agitation of the Irish, with whom, temperamentally, they feel they had so much in common, and the protection of the British military, whom they really don't like very much. Perhaps because of their hyphenated position between England and Ireland, the Anglo-Irish have produced several masters of the comedy of manners—Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and William Trevor among them. Bowen's writings are sprinkled with delicious little moments of social comedy, and the latitude she allowed herself in using the omniscient point of view lets us see into the minds of widely incompatible characters whose thoughts are inaccessible to each other. Here, in The Last September, we have a British officer's wife, Mrs. Vermont, and an Irish lady, Mrs. Carey, conversing at a tea and tennis party at a country house called Danielstown:
"Hoity-toity!" thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries). Turning to Mrs Carey (the Honourable Mrs Carey), who sat on her other side, she said frankly:
"Your scrumptious Irish teas make a perfect piggy-wig of me. And dining-room tea, of course, makes me a kiddy again."
"Does it really?" said Mrs Carey, and helped herself placidly to another slice of chocolate cake. She thought of Mrs Vermont as "a little person" and feared she detected in her a tendency, common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often wondered if the War had not made everybody from England a little commoner. She added pleasantly: "This chocolate cake is a specialty of Danielstown's. I believe it's a charm that they make it by, not a recipe."
"Things do run in families, don't they? Now I am sure you've all got ghosts."
"I can't think of any," said Mrs Carey, accepting another cup of tea …
Edith Somerville wrote in Irish Memories (1917) of "English people whose honesty and innocence would be endearing, if they were a little less overlaid by condescension." The patronizing tone adopted seemingly unconsciously by the English when speaking of or to the Irish shows no signs of abating even in our own day. The revulsion and hostility occasioned by IRA bombs going off near the Bank of England, by the mortar attacks on Heathrow Airport, are made all the more virulent by the sense that one is being betrayed by people who were considered to be loyally subservient—when, in the language of an older generation of American Southerners, the "good nigger" suddenly and inexplicably becomes the "bad nigger."
Speaking to an Anglo-Irishwoman, Mrs. Vermont will naturally presume that they are both of the same breed, unaware how complicated questions of identity were for the Anglo-Irish, who thought of themselves as Irish, while to their tenants they were "the English." This was brought home to me recently in a conversation with a friend from Connemara whose first language was Irish—a great fan of Elizabeth Bowen's writing. I was speaking to her of the ease with which Bowen used French words in her writing. "Yes of course," my friend said. "That would have been typical for an Englishwoman of her time."
To return to the conversation between Mrs. Vermont and Mrs. Carey, however. Here are the terms in which the English officer's wife commiserates with her Anglo-Irish acquaintance about the armed rebels in the hills above her house:
"All this is terrible for you all, isn't it? I do think you're so sporting the way you just stay where you are and keep going on. Who would ever have thought the Irish would turn out so disloyal—I mean, of course, the lower classes! I remember Mother saying in 1916—you know, when that dreadful rebellion broke out—she said 'This has been a shock to me; I never shall feel the same about the Irish again.' You see, she had brought us all up as kiddies to be so keen on the Irish, and Irish songs. I still have a little bog-oak pig she brought me back from an exhibition. She always said they were the most humorous people in the world, and with hearts of gold. Though of course we had none of us ever been in Ireland."
If you add to the isolation common to other members of her class in the twentieth century the peculiar circumstances of Elizabeth Bowen's childhood, you find yourself face to face with an individual perilously, heroically it seems to me, cut off from nurturing influences. Her father, Henry, broke with a family tradition that expected the master of Bowen's Court to live there and manage the affairs of the estate. He studied law, eventually becoming an examiner of landlords' titles for the Irish Land Commission, and set up housekeeping in Dublin. After suffering a nervous breakdown apparently brought on by overwork, Henry Bowen succumbed to a lifelong mental illness. His daughter responded with a "campaign of not noticing," which may be related to the subtlety and indirectness of her fiction: the reader must often follow barely detectable nuances in the development of character and plot. Not uncommonly in Bowen's work, something that is never mentioned—or that is alluded to ten pages later—may be the most important thing that is going on.
"I had come out of the tension and mystery of my father's illness, the apprehensive silence or chaotic shoutings," Bowen would later write, "with nothing more disastrous than a stammer." Great artists by definition turn defects into distinctions, and she would turn her speech impediment to advantage. As an internal British Council memo regarding Bowen as a lecturer put it in 1950: "She is a most successful lecturer with a most successful stammer." With Henry Bowen confined to a mental hospital near Dublin, his wife and daughter left for England, where they bounced from one relative and one rented house to another. In 1912 her mother told her sister-in-law, "I have good news, now I'm going to see what Heaven's like." She had cancer, and she died when Elizabeth was thirteen. As Victoria Glendinning writes in her biography, "One of the words at which her stammer consistently baulked her was 'mother.'"
From her first novel, The Hotel (1927), to her last, Eva Trout (1968), the isolated or orphaned girl is a recurring character in Bowen's fiction: the girl who lives much of her life in hotels, the girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. In The Death of the Heart, Bowen's best-known novel, Portia, the isolated, in-the-way girl, with her outsider's point of view, reminds one of the way Robert Lowell writes of himself as a child: "I wasn't a child at all—/ unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina / in the Golden House of Nero." The conflict with which The Death of the Heart opens is initiated when Portia's sister-in-law, Anna, finds and reads her diary, which contains disturbing though vague comments about Anna and St. Quentin, Anna's presumed lover (I say "presumed" because Bowen is not one to make such relationships explicit). "Fancy her watching me!" St. Quentin exclaims. "What a little monster she must be. And she looks so aloof." Anna responds: "She does not seem to think you are a snake in the grass, though she sees a good deal of grass for a snake to be in. There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses."
Portia Quayne is the daughter of a love-match. Her father, an older man, had fallen in love with Louise—this is his daughter-in-law Anna telling the story—"a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look." How unerringly, in these thumbnail sketches, Bowen places her characters: "[Louise] had a prostrated way of looking up at you," continues Anna,
"and that fluffy, bird's-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in. At that time, she must have been about twenty-nine. She knew almost nobody, but, because she was so plucky, someone had got her a job in a flower shop. She lived in a flatlet in Notting Hill Gate…. I often think of those dawns in Notting Hill Gate, with Irene leaking tears and looking for hairpins, and Mr. Quayne sitting up denouncing himself…. She would not be everyone's money. You may be sure that she let Mr. Quayne know that her little life was from now on entirely in his hands. By the end of those ten days he cannot have known, himself, whether he was a big brute or St. George."
No fool like an old fool, of course, and Mr. Quayne confesses the affair to his wife. "Mrs. Quayne was quite as splendid as ever: she stopped Mr. Quayne crying, then went straight down to the kitchen and made tea." Before he knows it, the poor man has been kicked out of his comfortable country house and finds himself living out the rest of his life on a reduced income with his new little family of three in hotels, pensions, and rented villas in the least fashionable parts of the Riviera. Portia's half-brother and his wife, Anna, take the orphan to live with them after both her parents have died. "A house is quiet, after a hotel," Portia tells her brother. "In a way, I am not used to it yet. In hotels you keep hearing other people, and in flats you had to be quiet for fear they should hear you."
Perhaps it is the habit of keeping quiet and listening that has sharpened Portia's attentiveness to the nuances of life in her new surroundings. "Mother and I got fond of it, in some ways. We used to make up stories about the people at dinner, and it was fun to watch people come and go." This outsider's point of view—cold-eyed, unillusioned—places Portia beyond the cozy circle of civilized mutual accommodation practiced by Anna and Thomas, and thus makes their visitor a dangerous presence.
What Portia's inner wounds might be, we are never quite sure. Of her mother, the child's constant companion, we learn little, even about the circumstances of her final illness. We only catch a glimpse—poignant for anyone who has ever lived on the cheap in Europe during the off-season—of the last little pension where they lived in Switzerland:
They always stayed in places before the season, when the funicular was not working yet…. Their room, though it was a back room facing into the pinewoods, had a balcony; they would run away from the salon and spend the long wet afternoons there. They would lie down covered with coats, leaving the window open, smelling the wet woodwork, hearing the gutters run. Turn abouts, they would read aloud to each other the Tauchnitz novels they had bought in Lucerne. Things for tea, the little stove and a bottle of violet methylated spirits stood on the wobbly commode between their beds, and at four o'clock Portia would make tea. They ate, in alternate mouthfuls, block chocolate and brioches. Postcards they liked, and Irene's and Portia's sketches were pinned to the pine walls.
And finally we see them leaving:
When they left that high-up village, when they left for ever, the big hotels were just being thrown open, the funicular would begin in another day. They drove down in a fly, down the familiar zigzag, Irene moaning and clutching Portia's hand. Portia could not weep at leaving the village, because her mother was in such pain. But she used to think of it while she waited at the Lucerne clinic, where Irene had the operation and died: she died at six in the evening, which had always been their happiest hour.
In Anna's relations with Thomas Quayne, one guesses there is something of Elizabeth Bowen's own marriage to Alan Cameron, an ex-army officer who bored the London literary crowd—perhaps deliberately, as a way of getting even for being ignored—by telling long war stories. One anecdote that Victoria Glendinning repeats has a guest at a Bowen's Court party, while searching through the old house trying to find a lavatory, opening a door and finding Alan Cameron "alone in a small room eating his supper off a tray." Thomas chafes in his study with a large whiskey while Anna has her tête-á-têtes with her friend St. Quentin and the enfant terrible, Eddie, whose relationship with Anna is even more equivocal than what the reader gathers about St. Quentin. The situation might remind someone who has read Bowen's biography of Mr. Cameron's complaints about the "Black Hats"—so-called from the rows of men's hats hanging in the hall of their house in Regent's Park when he would come home from his office at the BBC—who visited his wife. A complex and interesting marriage in which "married love" was less a factor than a mutual dependence and affection. "I never saw real strain or needling between them," May Sarton writes, "never for a second. Love affairs were a counterpoint."
Perhaps drawing parallels between marriages, fictional and real, even after husband and wife are dead, is an exercise in frivolous presumption. In The Death of the Heart, at any rate, Anna is rattled by her young sister-in-law's observant eye. "I cannot stand being watched. She watches us." Bowen renders the tense accommodation between this man and woman with her own keen eye:
She posted herself at the far side of the fire, in her close-fitting black dress, with her folded arms locked, wrapped up in tense thoughts. For those minutes of silence, Thomas fixed on her his considering eyes. Then he got up, took her by one elbow and angrily kissed her. "I'm never with you," he said.
"Well, look how we live."
"The way we live is hopeless."
Anna said, much more kindly: "Darling, don't be neurotic. I have had such a day."
He left her and looked round for his glass again. Meanwhile, he said to himself in a quoting voice: "We are minor in everything but our passions."
"Wherever did you read that?"
"Nowhere: I woke up and heard myself saying it, one night."
"How pompous you were in the night. I'm so glad I was asleep."
In a house galvanized by these tensions only Matchett, the impassive family retainer, one of the best serious portraits of a servant in fiction since Proust's Françoise, has very definite ideas about what is to be done with Portia. And with Bowen's beautifully specific imagination, the details of Matchett's standards ring with authenticity:
Matchett's ideas must date from the family house, where the young ladies, with bows en flowing horsetails of hair, supped upstairs with their governess, making toast, telling stories, telling each other's fortunes with apple peel. In the home of today there is no place for the miss: she has got to sink or swim. But Matchett, upstairs and down with her solid impassive tread, did not recognize that some tracts no longer exist. She seemed, instead, to detect some lack of life in the house, some organic failure in its propriety. Lack in the Quaynes' life of family custom seemed not only to disorientate Matchett but to rouse her contempt—family custom, partly kind, partly cruel, that has long been rationalised away. In this airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken.
Portia, like Bowen's other orphans, is in dire need of affection, unequipped by her experience with the means to ask for love. She turns to the massively self-controlled Matchett, whose very name tells us how stiff and contained a creature she is. A poignant scene in The Death of the Heart has Matchett sitting on Portia's bed, reluctantly drawn into the sort of confidential talk Portia had ought to be having with her sister-in-law if Anna were not so cold:
"She had a right, of course, to be where I am this minute," Matchett went on in a cold, dispassionate voice. "I've no call to be dawdling up here, not with all that sewing." Her weight stiffened on the bed; drawing herself up straight she folded her arms sternly, as though locking love for ever from her breast. Portia saw her outline against the window and knew this was not pique but arrogant rectitude—which sent her voice into distance two tones away. "I have my duties," she said, "and you should look for your fond-ofs where it is more proper."
Matchett is only one of the servants who appear in Bowen's pages—though a distinction should be made between Irish servants and English servants, in houses and thus in books. Irish people curiously manage to be both egalitarian and hierarchical at the same time. Hierarchical because traces of a feudal society endured perhaps as late as the 1950s on this little island with its bogs and mountains and months of rain. The Middle Ages were slow to disappear in a "land of saints and scholars" and large land holdings where even today, driving through the Irish countryside, the visitor is struck by mile after mile of demesne walls, perforated every so often by baronial gates and Gothic gate-lodges. Egalitarian, perhaps because the Irish are religious people whose church teaches that all souls are equal in the eyes of God.
And perhaps also because the man saddling the horse of his jumped-up Anglo-Irish squire or squireen may have, or fancy he has, noble blood running in his veins. The Kerry poet Egan O'Rahilly (1670–1726), of whom Brendan Kennelly has written, "O'Rahilly is a snob, but one of the great snobs of literature," wrote a great contemptuous putdown of the new Cromwellian adventurers who had conquered Ireland and usurped the land of the Irish nobility, using the house, as Bowen habitually does, as an emblem of a way of life:
That royal Cashel is bare of house and guest,
That Brian's turreted home is the otter's nest,
That the kings of the land have neither land nor crown
Has made me a beggar before you. Valentine Brown.
This is Frank O'Connor's translation from the Irish lament, where O'Rahilly characterizes himself in a haunting synecdoche as "An old grey eye, weeping for lost renown." The last line, in which the English name Valentine Brown would undoubtedly sound even more contemptible in the context of the Gaelic words of the original, recurs as the burden of every stanza in the poem. Kennelly comments: "O'Rahilly himself would have considered 'Valentine' a ridiculous name for anyone calling himself a gentleman, and as for 'Brown,' he would as soon have addressed a 'Jones' or a 'Robinson.'" I mention O'Rahilly and his great poem of hauteur and despair because he lived in the next county over from Elizabeth Bowen's County Cork, and because the people he so eloquently despised were of the same ilk as the Bowens.
Bowen never committed the modern heresy—inspired, I suppose, by what might be called a romantic Marxism—of wanting to become a member of the working class. Servants—or Mrs. Vermont, of the bog-oak pigs and the tendency to talk about her inside—were simply not her social equals. In the eyes of many readers, Americans especially, this makes her a snob. Even as sensible a reader as Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Robert Lowell expressing reservations about the Boston poet Anne Sexton, criticizes Bowen for her gentility:
Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the "our beautiful old silver" school of female writing, which is really boasting about how "nice" we were. V. Woolf, E. Bowen, R. West, etc.—they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they'd like to say.
I think Bishop mostly has it wrong. I would agree with her about Rebecca West, the precariousness of whose family origins and social status I touched on in my essay on her in these pages [in The New Criterion]. On the other hand, Anne Sexton in her poetry never struck me as being out to impress anyone about her social standing, which takes a back seat to her emotional problems and her drinking and drugging. In terms of social standing, Woolf and Bowen had nothing to prove; both wrote within the social context they were born into.
Bowen to a large extent took the world as she found it, and was more interested in her characters as people—with likes and dislikes, and especially with a desperate and often frustrated need for love—than as exemplars of social class. When she writes in "A Love Story" (1939), "Servants love love and money, but the Perry-Durhams bored the servants by now," at first one's radar of political correctness beeps; then one thinks again about the sentence and says, "How true that is!" When politics, as the modern substitute for religion that it has become among what are called in Britain "the chattering classes," arises in Bowen's novels—and it rarely arises—it is seen as a form of emotional desperation. Here is part of an exchange from The House in Paris between Karen, who has grave doubts about her impending marriage, and her upper-middle-class Aunt Violet. The time would be the early 1930s.
"Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is. With Ray I shall be so safe. I wish the Revolution would come soon; I should like to start fresh while I am still young, with everything that I had to depend on gone. I sometimes think it is people like us, Aunt Violet, people of consequence, who are unfortunate: we have nothing ahead. I feel it's time something happened."
"Surely so much has happened," said Aunt Violet. "And mightn't a Revolution be rather unfair?"
"I shall always work against it," said Karen grandly. "But I should like it to happen in spite of me."
Except for saying she wants to work against the Revolution, how much Karen sounds like W. H. Auden at this same time!
The "lack of life" Matchett regretted would not, I suspect, have been found at Bowen's Court when Elizabeth Bowen was mistress there. Something of the insouciance, the gay defiance of adversity, to be found at all levels of Irish society can be seen in Bowen's remark from the essay I have quoted:
the big house people were handicapped, shadowed and to an extent queered—by their pride, by their indignation at their decline and by their divorce from the countryside in whose heart their struggle was carried on…. These big house people admit only one class-distinction: they instinctively "place" a person who makes a poor mouth.
It is, I think, to the credit of big house people that they concealed their struggles with such nonchalance and for so long continued to throw about what did not really amount to much weight. It is to their credit that, with grass almost up to their doors and hardly a six-pence to turn over, they continued to be resented by the rest of Ireland as being the heartless rich.
The strengths of Bowen's big-house people—pluck, style, common sense, decency, and a sense of community—are what several of her orphans and heart-wounded girls yearn for, often without even understanding this. A question Bowen implicitly asks over and over is: What precisely is the emotional damage inflicted on her orphaned heroines (herself included) by the circumstances of their lives? In "The Easter Egg Party" (1940), Hermione, taken in for a long visit in the country by two maiden ladies who are friends of her recently divorced mother, frustrates the ladies' desire to help her. "Their object was to restore her childhood to her," the story begins. But there is some basic human generosity, some sense of give and take, that she has simply missed out on. A spoiled child, she can appreciate things only by owning them: "'I think those lambs are pretty,' said Hermione, suddenly pointing over a wall. 'I should like a pet lamb of my own; I should call it Percy.'" After she demands to leave the sisters' home, seeing that they refuse to cater to her self-centeredness, she leaves a sadness behind her, because they realize her childhood is beyond the power of their wholesome kindness to restore: "The sisters seldom speak of her even between themselves; she has left a sort of scar, like a flattened grave, in their hearts."
As implied by the age and nature of many of her characters, Bowen's novels and stories are songs of innocence and experience. The innocence is not necessarily pure, and the experience may be benign or sinister. In The House in Paris, astounded by a lie that the tyrannical Leopold, the illegitimate child of a troubled and unfortunate affair, is willing to tell, Henrietta, the settled, "normal" child, finds herself thinking: "'But we're children, people's belongings: we can't—' Incredulity made her go scarlet …" Leopold observes cynically: "Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have." Emma, beginning an adulterous affair in "Summer Night" (1941), realizes: "Yes, here she was, being settled down to as calmly as he might settle down to a meal." Portia in The Death of the Heart, because she is such a sacrificial lamb, is easy prey for the heartbreaker Eddie, Anna's young protégé. The novel, as its title implies, is almost an allegory, a Unicorn Tapestry in which the "pure"—Portia, Thomas—are victimized by the worldly and corrupt—Anna, St. Quentin, Eddie.
Unstrung by Eddie's betrayal, and disoriented by Anna's rejection of her, Portia takes the extraordinary step of going to the decent, avuncular old Major Brutt, a demobbed colonial ex-army officer who is floundering around trying to find his way in the fast-changing Britain of the Thirties, living in an attic room of a cheap hotel in the Cromwell Road. After she has told the Major how unhappy she is with her brother and sister-in-law, he asks quietly what she wants to do:
"Stay here with you," she said. "You do like me," she added. "You write to me; you send me puzzles; you say you think about me…. I could do things for you: we could have a home; we would not have to live in a hotel…. I could cook; my mother cooked when she lived in Notting Hill Gate. Why could you not marry me? I could cheer you up. I would not get in your way, and we should not be half so lonely."
Eva Trout, the rich young heiress and title character of Bowen's last, rather odd, and not very satisfactory novel, buys through the mail, in a similar effort to settle herself, a seaside house—sight unseen. When she descends on the small town to take possession, she startles the real-estate agent by her rather mad-seeming peremptoriness.
"Now," she announced, looking round for her charioteer, "I want to go home."
"Home?" cried he, fearing all was lost.
"Where is my house?"
Ireland and England, house and hotel, innocence and experience, the child and the world—these are the boundaries between which Elizabeth Bowen's fiction runs its supple and sinuous course. With a touch of the worldly French moralist, she is fond of delivering maxims reminiscent of Madame de Sévigné. In thinking about the way she mediates between her classic polarities, one might ponder the following formulation from the last part of The Death of the Heart: "Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it."
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