A Frightened Heart

11 A Frightened Heart Emptiness Standing on the Palatine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome that looks down upon the Forum and the Circus Maximus, Bowen wrote that it taught what “emptiness” can be. “Life has run out completely: it is alone there. Those existences, artificial as fireworks, died out on the forgetful dark.”1 The historical city reflected her emotional state: Rome was in ruins, and her dream of Bowen’s Court with its promise to someday shelter her and Ritchie was ended. When Bowen’s Court was demolished in 1960, Bowen suffered, hearing people say, “So, we hear you have had to sell your Irish castle.” Though Bowen said it was “a clean end,” as it was “better gone than having it degraded,” the emotional reverberations of the sale haunted her until her death in 1973.2 Her travel book, A Time in Rome, unearths her love and continuing interest in the city, its myths, monuments, ruins, and sites. She wrote to Ritchie in 1958: I worked intensively at my Rome book. I’m reading a tremendous amount of Roman history, which does fascinate me: one book after another I can’t put down […] why I ever read anything but Ancient history, I can’t think. I think its slightly abstract quality (due to distance of time) plus the almost utter absence of personality–interest which I like so much.3 But the city also emotionally threatened with its solidity and permanence. “My object,” she said of her trips in the late 1950s, “was to walk[…] [the city] into my head and (this time) keep it there.”4 Her sensuous temperament took in the massive ruins, the hard-edged shapes, as well as the touch, smell, and © The Author(s) 2019 P. Laurence, Elizabeth Bowen, Literary Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26415-4_11 297 298 P. Laurence even “the tastes of different dusts.” Yet during her stay, after the sale of Bowen’s Court, her vulnerable emotional state erupted. Her sense of loss confirms Proust’s insight that there are places “whose personality is so strong that some people die from them.”5 In October 1947, Bowen reflected this sense writing to Ritchie that she felt that every time she had to shut up the house and leave for London, something died in her. And cleaving to a word that reoccurs in her vocabulary, she noted that “she became a degree less virtuous.”6 When in Rome, Bowen experienced a breakdown. Zigzagging in wrong directions on Roman streets was a symptom, she reflected, of “inner trouble.” Juxtaposed throughout her book on the city are the substantiality of Rome and her own feelings of dispossession: “when it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion.” In debt to the Romans for the concept of “home,” Bowen praised their “domus-enshrined tradition [that] subordinated egotism and bred virtues which extended their value outside its walls” in her travel book. “It was the private source of the public character, educated, temperate, disciplined.” The city echoes her own dispossession from Bowen’s Court, and she recalls Cicero when in exile, pleading for the restoration of his home: “Leave it that to be dispossessed is horrible. To the banished races this was already known.”7 She leaves Rome, but “only from the train as it moved out of Rome” did she look, “backs of houses I have not ever seen before wavered into mists, stinging my eyes.” Then the stunning cry that recalls her relationship with Ritchie: “My darling, my dealing, my darling. Here we have no abiding city.” Her cry reverberates in the story, “Mysterious Kor,” in which lovers displaced by the ruins of war, embattled, are unable to find a place to harbor their love. Though A Time in Rome begins with intriguing descriptions of the city, it ends with the mortal uncertainties of St. Paul that she soon faced. The opening of the decade brought auguries of illness. When she returned to London from Italy, homeless, she found a temporary apartment in Stratfordon-Avon, and finished some commissioned jobs to make money so that she could get back to writing. Friends who visited described her as “frail but enchanting.” She returned to stay with London friends, first Helen Arbuthnot’s garden apartment, then, Rachel Ryan’s home. About six months later, she was ill with a coup de foudre, as she said: another attack of pneumonia. This was part of a pattern of respiratory illness in her life that smoking abetted, and that doctors had warned her about since the 1930s. 11 A Frightened Heart 299 Back to Oxford In October 1960, she decided to set up house in Oxford, where she had friends, and planned for the decoration of a flat that she rented from Berlin in Old Headington. She moved in March 1961, and though the new house was small, it had the atmosphere of Bowen’s Court: she decorated in a certain style and moved in furniture that reminded her of the past, said Jessica Rathdonnell. She liked the place, and in 1961 invited L.P. Hartley, a critic and friend, noting that it was really a portion of a large house with countless small staircases, a house in which one would not suffer from “claustrophobia or aggravated hostess-consciousness as one is liable to do staying with anybody in a flat.”8 She described the surroundings, large trees and lawn-like gardens, and it was, coincidentally, across from Waldencote, where she and Cameron had lived early in their marriage. Her friendship with Hartley began in 1929 during her years in Oxford and continued intermittently throughout her life. They shared an interest in reviewing, respect for each other’s writing, and a love of Italy, where their paths crossed in the late twenties and early thirties in Venice. Politically, Hartley belonged to the conservative Asquith set often in conflict with the reform-minded liberal prime minister, Lloyd George. Consequently, he was snubbed by the politically liberal Bloomsbury group that Bowen enjoyed, at times, because of her friendship with Woolf, her connection with Harold Nicolson, and her reviews for the liberal New Statesman, for which Leonard Woolf also wrote. Hartley became a frequent reviewer in the 1920s, and praised Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel, in The Spectator. In 1955, he lauded her poetic novel The World of Love, writing, “whenever you write you add something to the field of fiction and a new perception of beauty. No one else does.”9 She also wrote several reviews praising Hartley’s books, particularly The Go-Between, which gained him public recognition and was made into a successful film by Harold Pinter in 1971. Her reviews of his work were sharp and sincerely meant, unlike many others that she wrote that were encouraging but uncritical.10 Her letters to him include more literary commentary than those to others. He was particularly appreciative of her critical observations of the macabre character of Hilda in his novel Eustace and Hilda before its publication in 1947. He wrote that not only was he pleased with her understanding of his character but that he, not having yet received full recognition for his novels, carried her letter about “like a talisman equally sovereign in mood of depression or exaltation. Everything you said delighted and uplifted me. I feel no one can ever have had a letter which was such a pure joy to receive.”11 The 1930s was a 300 P. Laurence decade in which Bowen put talent and interest into her letters to others. After Cameron’s death she openly confided her sense of vacancy to Hartley, he being one of her few friends who had appreciated Cameron. Bowen was also drawn to the writing of Anthony Powell, becoming friends with him and his Anglo-Irish wife, Violet, when they moved to Regent’s Park. She was interested in Violet, who had written a book she admired and reviewed, The Irish Cousins, about the kinship and the writing of Somerville and Ross, among her favorite authors. Powell said he was in the awkward position with her of recognizing that her books had considerable merit, but as a reviewer he found them extraordinarily tough to read. He was not alone in this difficulty. Bowen did, however, review three Powell novels, including Venusberg, and two novels from his later sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, in 1952. She noted the change in his angle and manner from the 1930s novel to the later ones and admired the way in which he brought the past back. And with her visual acuteness, she noted his almost painted effect in his writings. Dance to the Music of Time was among the last volumes she read when ill in Hythe at the end of her life. Bowen’s life at White Lodge was low-key. She was writing her last novel, Eva Trout, and her cousin, Jessica Rathdonnell, was there to help with the typing. She remarked on Bowen’s discipline, up early each morning to write. Bowen once explained her writing habits in an interview with the journalist, Raymond Bennett: arising early every morning to write, she explained that she carried the outline for a short story or a novel in her head, then wrote a dossier on each character, notes on home background, income, education and interests, and then went straight to the typewriter. She made three to five drafts of a work on average. Jessica Rathdonnell sketched Bowen then as a “tall, large woman, her hair pulled back, cigarette always in hand, and who put you at ease.”12 Importantly, said Jessica, she was loyal to her family that had taken charge of her after her mother’s death. At that time, Bowen spent much time with her cousin, Veronica Colley, an unassuming companion who also loved literature, wrote stories, and worked at a local library in Buckinghamshire: both “bereft,” according to Laetitia Lefroy, Veronica’s daughter. Bowen was adrift without a stable home, struggling still with finances and not seeing much of Ritchie. The Cost of Letters Bowen was of the first generation of women writers to attempt to earn a living through writing. Throughout her life, she embraced popular culture not only because of her interest in a wider audience and new media but also because 11 A Frightened Heart 301 she needed money. In 1936, The House in Paris was chosen for the American Book of the Month Club, and she wrote to Humphry House that it brought in £1100, welcome because she had an appalling number of bills. She mentioned in the same letter that this had happened once before with her first novel, The Hotel, published in 1927, when she made “really pots of money over that” and did repairs at Bowen’s Court.13 And then The Heat of the Day, published in 1949, sold very well. The Times, wrote Rose Macaulay, “tells me it’s going like hot cakes; so does Daniel George [her Cape editor]—And in America too; how lovely that an exquisite piece of work should be a hot cake too.”14 Though partially supported by her husband before his death in 1952, she still had to earn money as there were more bills during the war, higher Irish taxes on Bowen’s Court, and a need for cash to pay for war damages to her Regent’s Park townhouse in 1944. She wrote to the Westminster Bank in Harpenden, telling them that Curtis Brown, her agent, would give them “a formal guarantee on the strength of £100 which I am to receive from Messrs. Jonathan Cape on the delivery of the final short story of a Collection […]. I ask this as I am anxious to settle a claim for £46 for Irish income tax and to pay out about £30 for expenses to do with repairs to this house. As you know, no compensation for war damage is to be settled in cash until after the war.”15 In 1946–1947, one-fourth of her income came from Tatler reviews: £525 out of her total earnings of £2164.16 But, admittedly, she led a certain lifestyle, and in 1946 confessed after visiting the sumptuous apartment of Lord Gerald Berner, a wealthy and eccentric composer, “If you ask me, I hold that money can buy almost everything that is worth having.”17 Bowen loved to entertain generously and liked buying fine clothes, and so when asked how much income would need annually in a 1945 Horizon survey of writers, she replied £3500, compared to Plomer’s and most other authors modest reply, £1100.18 In 1953, after Cameron’s death, she wrote about reluctantly rejecting a remunerative Holiday magazine assignment on Princess Margaret’s involvement with Peter Townsend as a matter of taste. Six years later, faced with the crisis of having to sell Bowen’s Court, and having lost her husband’s pension, she panicked and sold valuables and asked Ritchie if she could borrow £100. Fatigued with trying to finish A Time in Rome, she again noted financial strain. In 1959, she reported that her bank account was in an unhealthy state and the Vernons and the Blacks, close Irish friends, gave her a loan. Having to earn money interfered in her literary productivity and she agreed in 1962 to lecture at the University of Wisconsin for several months earning the handsome sum of $10,000. She said she would rather have spent the time finishing The Little Girls. 302 P. Laurence In the 1960s, after the sale of the house, she continued to write articles for Holiday, Vogue, and Women’s Day, among others, alongside her stories and novels. Her agents at Curtis Brown aggressively marketed her writing, and the voluminous files document their efforts on her behalf. Spenser Curtis Brown urged chasing down the money, “Elizabeth is, as always, overdrawn and would therefore like you to collect the money [for Eva Trout rights] as soon as you can.”19 The files are replete with friendly and flattering memos from him, Allen Collins, and Emilie Jacobson to Bowen, editors, and publishers who pitched her stories to better-paying magazines: The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and Vogue. Bowen’s versatility and range emerge in the popular articles she wrote over the decade, “How to Be Yourself but not Eccentric” and “Enemies of Charm” for Vogue; “The Beauty of Being Your Age” for Harper’s Bazaar; “Mirrors are Magic” for House & Garden; “The Case for Summer Romance” for Glamour; “Elizabeth Bowen Talks about Writing” for Mademoiselle; “Whatever Became of Flirting” for McCall’s; and “A Profile of Rome” for The New York Times. She would often earn $500 for an article in a women’s magazine. There were print sales of short stories and fees for extracts, quotations, translations, and attempts at serialization during the time she was writing that paid well—The Little Girls and Eva Trout. A realization of the dramatic possibilities and screen-worthiness of Bowen’s stories and novels also began to take off: lucrative options were offered for dramatic adaptations of The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart, and motion picture and television rights for The House in Paris by the producers, E. Mawby Green and Edward Allen Feibert who had unsuccessfully produced a dramatic version on Broadway in 1940. Drama and film options potentially paid $1000 a year and $20,000 purchase price. But though she earned some money, many of these projects did not come to fruition. What also begins to filter into the Curtis Brown letters and memos toward the end of the 1960s is that Bowen’s style is changing and going out of fashion. One editor wrote that though Eva Trout is impressive, it begins to seem too subtle or mannered for the women’s magazine audience. When one of her most supportive agents, Emilie Jacobson, sent Bowen’s autobiographical fragments for publication to her friend, William Maxwell at the New Yorker, he found her writing uneven and not of the moment. He “loved her books and loved her” but her gift was faltering.20 Disillusionment and fears about the future revealed a new vulnerability in Bowen but she was quick to develop a carapace, and increasingly relied on friends who invited her to stay in their homes for longer periods of time. 11 A Frightened Heart 303 The Little Girls She, nevertheless, finished The Little Girls in 1964, a novel shadowed by her childhood towns of Hythe and Folkstone. Its original title, Race with Time, reflects Bowen—now 65—circling around the topics of aging, memory, and past and present time. In the novel, three women in their fifties return to a place where they were schoolgirls and lived intensely in a conspiratorial friendship. Bowen investigates whether the return to childhood places as well as the objects and things of childhood can revive friendships and memory in adulthood. Critics praised the novel’s sense of nostalgia—wrongly, according to Bowen; comedy, she asserted, is its core. She confessed to Ritchie that she often tied herself into knots over her writing, trying to conceal how “unguardedly silly” she was, but was casting off the mask in this novel.21 Her publisher, Cape, found her tone and the ending of the novel, which she originally conceived of as a musical finale, problematic. She consulted with Plomer about revisions and was glad to receive his letter of advice about revision. Bowen is drawn to the stories of female pre-adolescents and adolescents. She inhabits their sense of anger or dislocation caused by a mother or father’s death that entails their being sent to a relative’s home; those who have a touch of the demonic or “madness” or those who like to write diaries or letters that disrupt the hypocritical households they enter as in The Little Girls; She wrote of an unhappy orphans like Portia in The Death of the Heart who is sent to her half-brother’s unwelcoming bourgeois home; or perky, rootless Henrietta in The House in Paris who feels as if she had been dropped down an emotional well on her way to her grandmother’s; or aloof Theodora who is angry with hypocritical adults in Friends and Relations; or abandoned Eva Trout who is willfully destructive and angry with her narcissistic and neglectful father. And this leads to the conspiratorial secrets that young girls share with one another in The Little Girls. This leads to little girls who conspiratorially entrust secrets to one another. Girls meet in the novel, The Little Girls, as grown-ups to reanimate their childhood memories and bonds. Recalling their secret world, they return to a particular location to find a coffer that they buried in the earth for posterity. They travel to their school, St. Agatha’s, near a site with “a crooked swing,” to unearth it, but time has passed, and when they find it, it is empty. They turn to the present and scrutinize what they have become as adult women. The most Proustian of Bowen’s novels, the “voluntary” search for a memory through an object from the past summons a passage in Proust: 304 P. Laurence And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.22 The women’s search for the coffer is “a labor in vain,” as the material object that will summon memory is unknown. A “crooked swing” involuntarily sparks the past for Dinah as she prepares objects in a cave for someone to come upon in the future. Early in the novel The Little Girls, Dinah as an adult, in discussion with her friend, Frank, notes why she collects “things.” They are, she says, “clues to reconstruct us from. Expressive objects. What really expresses people? The things—I’m sure—that they have obsessions about.”23 Dinah explains the sensory experience of the past that an object can arouse: I’ve been having the most extraordinary sensation! Yes, and I still am, it’s still going on! Because to remember something, all in a flash, so completely that it’s not “then” but “now,” surely is a sensation, isn’t it. I do know it’s far, far more than a mere memory! One’s right back again into it, right in the middle. It’s happening round one. Not only that but it never has not been happening.24 Dinah here offers a fair paraphrase of Proust’s notion of how involuntary memory returns when an everyday sensation in the present triggers the taste of a madeleine or the memory of a swing. Dinah here blurs the distinction between time past and present: time past is always embodied in the present, and awareness of its reoccurrence creates a third time, that of realization. This is what Bowen in another context terms, “the enforced return.” In other stories about little girls, Bowen illuminates the defenses of adolescents who articulate or write in letters or diaries what they feel. Roger in “The Visitor” waits at his aunt Emery’s house while his mother is dying: “here he was alone enisled with tragedy.” Did Bowen’s experience of being “next door” when her mother was dying in Hythe contribute to the feeling of the story? Her knack for an apt and unusual word choice, “enisled,” to capture the boy’s feeling of being stranded arrests our attention.25 The boy in the story implores no one, but whispers “Let it not have to be,” becoming hysterical in anticipation of his mother’s death. When finally told of the death, he enters an emotionally surreal “blue empty space.” The notion of betrayal and abandonment of children by mothers—sometimes, voluntary and, sometimes, by death—is the nerve center of several of 11 A Frightened Heart 305 her works. In The House in Paris, the all-consuming Mme Fisher manipulates and betrays her daughter, Naomi, in regard to her fiancée, Max, with whom she, herself, is obsessed. Her maternal image hovers darkly not only over her daughter but shadows the young girls in her pension, the visiting Henrietta, and it haunts Max. Her three short taps on the ceiling for attention when bedridden has traces of a gothic presence. Another mother in the novel, Leopold’s birth mother, Karen, promises to visit but never arrives. His young friend Henrietta, also motherless, witnesses his disappointment and hears him sobbing and reflects, “you only weep like that when a room hears.” Bowen evokes vivid feelings when mothers menace or are absent in the lives of their children. This is reflected in the emotional barrenness of characters such as the young girl in “Coming Home,” who returns to an empty house after school. The hollowness also figures in her motherless character Eva Trout, who experiences abandonment by her father: Eva is unable to receive love when it comes to her through her sympathetic teacher, and driven by blind needs, neglects her own son. At other times, little girls are just oppositional toward the adult world. Bowen presents not only girls who are angry—colloquially, “mad”—but adolescent girls who conspire against and are “perverse” toward grown-ups. In “Charity,” Rachel and Charity try to escape the adults around them by finding secret places to which they can retreat: They sat on the window-sill outside, told each other stories and listened to the rooks going to bed […]. The happiness that she had been waiting for all day seemed to have something to do with the light behind the trees, the rooks, and the dry chintzy smell of the curtains when she leant back her head against them into the room. Also, there is something very heroic about dangling one’s legs at a height.26 “The Jungle” is another story of an intense and secret relationship between adolescent girls. Their affection develops when they are away at a boarding school, where they discover life in “an absolutely neglected and wild place,” physically and morally outside the school grounds and rules. Rachel desperately desires to share this secret place with her best friend, Elise.27 When Rachel first enters this place, she “felt a funny lurch in her imagination as she entered […] everything in it tumbled together, then shook apart again, a little altered in their relations to each other, a little changed.” She longs to link arms with the elusive Elise, whose hair is cut short like a boy’s and possesses a “quick, definite,” and easy physicality. She wants to show her the secret place. Not a little girl anymore, Rachel is drawn to Elise’s body, observing that Elise 306 P. Laurence looks “just like a compact boy in tights.” The sensuously described garden and jungle where they play is a setting for adolescent infatuation: It was early October, the day smelt of potting-sheds and scaly wet tree trunks. They had woken to find a mist like a sea round the house; now that was being drawn up and the sun came wavering through it. The white garden-gate was pale gold and the leave of the “hedges” twinkled. The mist was still clinging in sticky shreds, cobwebs, to the box-hedges, the yellow leaves on the espaliers, the lolling staggering clumps of Michaelmas daisies; like shreds of rag, Rachel thought, clinging to brambles. Sexuality surfaces in this description but is accompanied by cold feelings of death. Rachel imagines finding in this lush jungle a “dead body, a girl’s arm coming out of the bushes”; she also fears that she has committed the murder herself. This severed arm appearing in a bad dream at the beginning of the story turns out to be the real-life arm of the sleeping Elise. Rachel transforms the dream of death and awakens the sleeping girl to sexuality. It reveals both the sense of conspiracy and intimacy in girls’ friendships, and their emerging female sexual identity and longings.28 Moving to Hythe But there was always a place for Ritchie, even in her new home in Hythe. When visiting in September 1963 with Noreen, she bought, on impulse, a modest red brick house on Church Hill facing St. Leonard’s Church (Figs. 11.1 and 11.2). The hill was steep with a footpath up to the house; from the back, it looked over Romney Marsh. She named it “Carbury” (later changed to “Carbery”) after the demolished family estate of her mother’s forebears in County Kildare. The cost, £4700, was more than covered by the sale of some of her papers to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.29 Work on the house began in January 1965, and in March of the same year, she wrote that she was glad to leave Oxford and move to Carbery. Visitors were welcome and stayed in town enjoying hospitality at the White Hart Hotel on High Street, run by Bowen’s accommodating friend, Edna Strawson. That summer, Bowen traveled again to a city she loved, New York, and painted a word picture: “August in NY is rather fascinating: a sort of miasma 11 A Frightened Heart 307 Fig. 11.1 Carbery, Bowen’s last home in Hythe, England. Rights holder and Courtesy of Sue Kewer of heat and emptiness. Long stretching avenues really almost literally empty, pallid in the hazed over sun. And mile-long empty untrodden corridors even in the Plaza Hotel. New York should be painted now.”30 She was already working on a new play and a novel, Eva Trout. The Nativity Play: Finding Common Ground After the publication of The Little Girls, Bowen became engaged in a new venture, a collaborative project with Derek Hill to address the divisions in Irish society. In an ecumenical spirit, they produced A Nativity Play during a period of violent conflict between the Irish and the Black and Tans. Hill created the theatrical design and Bowen, the script, and it was first performed in a 308 Fig. 11.2 P. Laurence St. Leonard’s Church. Rights holder and Courtesy of P. Laurence Catholic church in Limerick in 1964. Another performance occurred at Christmas time in 1970 in a Protestant cathedral in Derry. Bowen considered it a great success because the Pope had lifted the ban against Roman Catholics entering Protestant churches, and people of different faiths attended. Another timely presentation of the play occurred in Londonderry Cathedral after Bloody Sunday in January 1972, the pivotal event at which 26 unarmed civil rights protestors, some IRA, were shot in Derry, Northern Ireland, by British soldiers. Many Anglicans and Catholics attended the sad but hopeful event that Bowen and Hill created in an attempt to find common social and religious ground. The play, when presented in the Londonderry Cathedral, was “almost certainly the last ecumenical event held in the cathedral” said Hill, “as the Troubles had already begun.” The Londonderry Sentinel, in reviewing the Derry performance, noted that 1000 people attended, and it was the first time the cathedral had been used for an interdenominational purpose.31 In this performance Jean Black, Bowen’s friend, and Hill were the narrators. It might 11 A Frightened Heart 309 seem surprising for the Anglo-Irish Bowen to pen such a play to be performed in Derry where violence erupted daily, but her participation reveals her evolving commitment to the traditions of conciliation through religion. The Nativity Play uncovered her little-noted ability to write an accessible dramatic pageant that emphasizes the human element in religion. Bowen structures the pageant around three themes, the Annunciation, the responses of the three Kings, and the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Magi at the birth of Jesus. Interweaving traditional carols such as “Adeste Fideles” with both poetic and everyday language, Bowen writes in Act II, of “The Annunciation,” “Young girls, friends of Mary, enter her chambers wondering where she has gone. One tampers with Mary’s weaving; another places anemones in a water pot asking, “What is it that sets her apart?/From you and me.”32 In Act III, a shepherd waits for his fellows to come back from their flocks, and the narrator announces, “silence/Silence, As though the Earth were holding her breath.” Later, the angel’s prophecy is fulfilled: the babe is born to Mary in a stable in Bethlehem and visitors arrive to worship. Three children arrive bearing gifts of smooth multicolored pebbles, Bowen’s poignant touch. One brings a shell, another a mouse, and the last one, nothing, as his father is a beggar. The play was an ecumenical and political venture for Bowen as she collaborated with Hill in a creative project to reconcile cultural divisions in Irish life that were exploding into violence around her. Hill also evoked other aspects of Bowen’s Anglo-Irish identity. Years earlier, she had squabbled with him about his insulting descriptions of the Anglo-Irish in his 1946 “Letter from Ireland,” appearing in Connolly’s Horizon. Attempting to define what he labeled “the class,” Hill made sweeping assertions about “an old-world squirearchy now dying off,” and about some Anglican references to Roman Catholicism as “‘the religion below stairs,’ whilst others still refuse to employ a Catholic interior staff,” which, he said, “shows how isolated, and exceptional they have remained.”33 The Anglo-Irish, he said, represented “a more British than the British ‘county’ outlook,” stereotyping their interest in hunting foxes rather than the pursuit of literary interests, which he stated had not flowered since the eighteenth century. He parodied the Anglo-Irish habits of wearing faded brocades, felt hats, and regimental brooches. Bowen attacked his description as “presumptuous” in Horizon and asserted her authority as an Anglo-Irish person by heredity, family relationships, and loyalty. Her tone was sharp: “The Anglo-Irish are a study in themselves, and you haven’t had time to get round to them. I should think: they take up a lot of time and you’re here in Ireland to paint; so what you say seems much less perceptive, more superficial and less near the mark than anything else you say. Also it is most awfully rude.”34 Hill prefigures Declan Kiberd’s criticism of the “performance” of the gentry. Despite the ambivalence she felt, Bowen justified her Anglo-Irish culture, and though Reports from Eire offers a culturally ambivalent view, her 310 P. Laurence family history, Bowen’s Court, conveys her love of Ireland and the traditions of the Bowens the exploitation of land and labor upheld by Protestant nationalism. In The Shelborne Hotel, she again aestheticizes elite Ascendancy traditions in presenting its social history, a hotel that Isaiah Berlin stayed in en route to visiting Bowen. He observed its charm: “the people in the Smoking room of this hotel, with & without mad eyes or whiskers c[oul]d all occur in Turgenev short stories.”35 All of this attests to the complexity of Bowen’s identity and the many strands in Anglo-Irish experience. Bowen, proud of aspects of her culture, resented Hill’s attack, and asserted Anglo-Irish contributions to Irish literature when she attended a West Sussex art festival event in December 1970. Though trumpeted as a nonpolitical event for “eccentrics,” this festival was a celebration of nineteenth-century AngloIrish literature and a masquerade for a disappearing culture. Lady Birley hosted the discussion of Irish art and poetry, “The Long Table Irish Talk,” inviting Bowen, Edith Somerville, and Violet Martin, authors of The Real Charlotte, and Connolly to give talks, along with other notables such as Raymond Mortimer and Maurice Collins. Hill also invited Bruce Arnold, who became his biographer. Arnold remembered his impression of Bowen at this event, somewhat formidable and opinionated in these last years of her life, but nevertheless “an elegant, elderly lady dressed in a summer frock, her shoulders slightly stooped, her eyes clear and bright, she watched everyone and seemed pleased as she recognized old friends.”36 In her talk, Bowen spoke of her own generation of writers and its struggle to find new forms of expression and noted her admiration for O’Faolain as “the most complete and abiding example Ireland has of the man of letters.”37 She added, seeking common ground and breaking the mood of Anglo-Irish homage, that O’Faolain was the son of an Irish constable and a devout Catholic mother. At the same event, Arnold observed that Bowen and Connolly were of the same Anglo-Irish class, altered by time and circumstance, and they knew each other well. They were neighbors, not only in sharing an Irish past but both having houses in Hythe after 1965. But Arnold also observed that Connolly, educated at Eton and Oxford and living in England, had erased most traces of Irishness, “appearing” English. Nevertheless, to Connolly’s credit, his 1942 Irish issue of Horizon sought balance: to give a picture of contemporary Eire as seen by Irish writers living under the restrictions of neutrality. In his “Comment” on the issue, Connolly accepts the Irish suspicion of Britain and its bitterness about the ports that the British wanted to take back for defense. “No one could read any Anglo-Irish history without being convinced of the Irish case … our record in Ireland is one of seven centuries of cruelty, injustice, intolerance and exploitation.”38 “Our record” reveals Connolly’s identification with the English. He bridled at the varieties of anti-British feeling in Ireland and supported those willing to 11 A Frightened Heart 311 take the risk and die in the war, not those who have “kept their calendar at 1938,” alluding to Ireland’s stance of neutrality. The Horizon issue is devoted to propaganda for the Irish, where he identifies Irish talent, beleaguered and isolated during neutrality. And despite cultural sparring with Patrick Kavanaugh in the same issue, he published part of Kavanaugh’s neglected long poem, “The Great Hunger,” bringing attention to Irish woe and the deprivations of the country; O’Faolain’s “Yeats and the Younger Generation”; and Frank O’Connor’s “The Future of Irish Literature.” Eva Trout In 1966, Bowen’s bouts of bronchitis were seriously beginning again and they interrupted work on her novel Eva Trout, as she related in letters to Veronica Wedgwood. She had two cases of the flu that winter, yet carried on with her story of a bold, alarming, and independent-minded woman. This novel reflects a marked change in Bowen’s view of the world and narrative style. Set in the postwar years, Eva Trout reeks of abandonment, homelessness, and inhumanity, a climate generated by World War II and the Vietnam War. She is a monstrous character who verges on the grotesque and the comic, and veers into a realm of ugliness that does not appear in Bowen’s earlier novels. Eva, having suffered the loss of her mother as a child, lives an estranged life under the shadow of her father’s consuming passion for his lover, Constantine. “Displaced persons” whose lives and language are fractured raise her, influencing the development of her strange speech pattern. She is blighted by homelessness, always an important theme in Bowen, and remains itinerant throughout the novel, living an alienated life in an abandoned castle with a dying friend with whom she has a fragile lesbian relationship, and, later moving to a bombed-out house, symbol of the destruction and emptiness of her life. Yet she is consumed with longing for a home. “In some other life, Eva had been shown a knocked about doll house (had it not stood on a verandah somewhere?) and knelt down to look deeply into its dramatic rooms. She desired it.”39 And though welcomed into the home of her beloved teacher Mrs. Arable, she perversely sets out to destroy it. She is a shape-shifter and evokes horror as she lures her teacher’s husband into a sexual liaison that destroys all their relationships. She is ruthless as she moves through others’ lives and homes, shattering them with “the patient, abiding, encircling will of a monster.” She lies to Mrs. Arable about being pregnant and bizarrely runs off to buy an American baby, who turns out to be a deaf-mute. She lives a lavish material life, finds romance, and is accidentally killed by her son. And though Eva’s body, like her character, is misshapen and evokes repulsion, the paradox is that she also excites fascination. She is a new subject for 312 P. Laurence Bowen, an independent woman who boldly lives her own life and openly seeks sexual relationships, but also seems, at times, to be a parody of a woman gone amok with liberation. Eva moves straight ahead through “changing scenes” (the book’s subtitle) in a destructive whirl set during the women’s movement. With her fractured language, outlandish behavior, and outsized body, Eva is a caricature bordering on the grotesque and humorous. Iris Murdoch responded to the macabre aspects of the novel upon publication: “What a splendid and delicious novel … I believed Eva so absolutely and cd [sic] have enjoyed going on and on, anywhere in her company! And the funny parts were so funny (the lunch, that school).”40 Murdoch reveled in and shared Bowen’s interest in absurdity and erotic adventure, a mixture found, for example, in her own novel The Severed Head. Eva Trout is a novel of its time, revealing the toll the Vietnam war, the women’s movements, and changing times exacted on people’s minds and bodies. The novel’s plot and style are more tortuous than those of her earlier novels, reflecting the turbulence of the 1960s and marking a shift in Bowen’s sensibility and writing to a more menacing, violent, inarticulate, and ugly world. After Eva flees the Arables, she finds a house of her own, Cathay, in North Foreland, that has, like her life, been partially destroyed by a bomb, imaging the novel’s traces of the effects of war. Houses, Bowen’s continuing preoccupation in this novel, are often windowless, shuttered, sightless, and silent; people are disembodied, shadowed, submerged, and occult. And time, “inside Eva’s mind, lay about like various pieces of a fragmented picture.”41 Her adopted deaf-mute son seems like a character who has wandered in from a Beckett play; however, Bowen had observed deafness in her Uncle George who lived nearby in Dublin, and was close to her in her childhood. Both characters expose language as ineffectual or manqué, traces of modernism, reflecting Bowen’s loss of trust in words in her later years. The story “Look at All Those Roses,” written a few years later, creates the same frightening atmosphere as in Eva Trout, in a house where an absent father has mysteriously injured a daughter who becomes an invalid. Like Eva, the damaged girl is “the core and nerve of the house” and exposes the hidden injuries of a father, a dysfunctional family, and a culture.42 Eudora Welty and William Maxwell discussing this story puzzled over what the father had done to the girl’s back— “did he do it while he was drunk?”—and was he buried under the rosebush? Welty concluded that he probably dropped the girl and was buried under the bush.43 John Bayley thought that the novel was a response to war: “Now, one feels the War is all.” He sees that the loving relationship between Eva and her friend Elsinore when young, “their ambiance, so marvelously conveyed, turn[s] 11 A Frightened Heart 313 everything into a nightmare (in a sense) because nightmare is all there is. Other responses to the War reveal this absence of any alternative because the waif plays with matches not in a house but in a petrol dump.” What he finds so intriguing, as had Murdoch, his wife, is the mixture of comedy and tears in the novel, but what is most stimulating to him is the “modernity: the sense of burning one’s fingers with the present moment.”44 The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1969, one of the oldest prizes in England, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970. Bowen was venturing in new directions in this novel with a character longing for a home but destructive of it. It links her to other writers: Murdoch, for example, with her mixture of melodrama, humor, and grimness in a novel such as The Bell, and also a writer such as Ian McEwan in his alarming novel Saturday. A link among them can be found in Bowen’s atmosphere of domestic terror not only in Eva Trout but in “The Move-In,” the first chapter of an unfinished novel that she was writing at the end of her life.45 This opening chapter generates again the menace of domestic crime and violence with the arrival of a group of young strangers at an isolated house inhabited by elderly people. The young punks prepare to invade the house. The violation of a home’s safe space elicits the fear and terror of strangers committing crimes and causing havoc. Similarly, in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, thugs enter the house of a distinguished neurosurgeon to terrorize his family during a politically troubled time after 9/11 and the impending war in Iraq. Bowen’s theme of domestic terror rebounds from the horrors of the Vietnam War and reverberates in Eva Trout, but is also prescient of the domestic and global terror of today. Bowen was also racing at this time to finish Pictures and Conversations, an autobiographical collage that she was developing with her agent, Curtis Brown, and hoping to complete by February 1971. She wrote at that time to Plomer of “the return of the wretched bronchitis,” but she was resilient.46 After publishing Eva Trout, her health failing, Bowen took up her last residency at Princeton University in September 1969, earning $6000 for the course. She met with student unrest and anti-Vietnam War protests, and her ire was piqued by what she termed the “hysterical Moratoriums” on the campus. She considered them “idiotic.” Conservative and out of touch with the political energy in America, she sided with Nixon’s silent majority in support of the war; she also was detached from the 1960s politics of Oxford’s New Left.47 Bowen was at Princeton to teach creative writing for a term, September to December 1969, and she was inspirational, as always, with students. Sensitive to her surroundings, she described the campus, the curious physical atmosphere of Princeton: part suburban; part “coloured quarter” with gaily painted 314 P. Laurence balconied houses with gardens; part decaying patches; and a distance away, the wealthy part, all sweeps and lawns. She described the eight undergraduates assigned to do advanced work with her “as mild as gazelles; and long may they remain so.” One of them, Thomas Hyde, distinguished himself by becoming her protégé in the years after she left Princeton. She not only furthered his application to New College, one of the oldest in Oxford, but invited him to visit her at Hythe and at the Vernons’ estate in Kinsale, despite her failing health. About six months after her return to England in 1970, Bowen wrote to Plomer about “Poor Princeton”: “To tell you the truth. I don’t care two hoots about the Vietnamese, Northern or Southern: what I can’t stand is that America should suffer. What I do feel is that these insane protests and demonstrations can only be doing more harm than good.”48 Showing her Tory colors, she revealed that she was cheered by the election of the Conservatives in England, having always admired Edward Heath: “the idea (up to last June) of a possible further five years of that dreary Labour government had become a nightmare.” A few years earlier, she had also alluded to politics in America when John Kennedy beat the more traditional Henry Cabot Lodge in the senate race.49 She again flaunted her conservative politics, siding with the Lodge dynasty, and felt “a curious sensation to have our lives gambled with by President Kennedy,” who became part of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Illness After her brave jaunt to Princeton in the spring of 1970, Bowen’s acute bronchitis returned, as it would at increasingly short intervals. She spent time at the Vernons’ home in September. Writing regularly to Veronica Wedgwood during this period, she related that she went to a nursing home for pneumonia in January 1971. But the next year was a busy one, attesting to her will to go on. In February she was at the Bear Hotel in Woodstock, an elegant thirteenth-century inn near Blenheim, to get away from the damp sea fog of Hythe that irritated her lungs. It was a hotel believed to be haunted, according to local legend, a feature that would have pleased Bowen. She also was receiving radium treatments at University College Hospital, London, and was yet determined to publish Pictures and Conversations before the end of the year. In the same year, from her theater of her bed, she was reading Pushkin and Iris Murdoch, and judging a Booker prize with Cyril Connolly and George Steiner. Bowen defied the observation of the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun 11 A Frightened Heart 315 that there is little overt triumph in the last years of a woman’s life.50 Molly Keane, one of her favorite Irish friends, captured their last meeting in a restaurant the year before Bowen died. Keane observed that men turned their heads when Bowen entered a room, as she had a striking presence and certain quality of “enchantment.” On this occasion she wore a stiff white silk Viennese coat and talked about buying wigs. “She never dwindled,” Keane said. “I wish Elizabeth were here.”51 In 1955, after attending a Church of Ireland family funeral, Bowen was depressed, and ironically observed that Roman Catholic funerals were much gayer. Confirming her life-enhancing spirit, she announced to her Aunt Edie that she would like her own funeral to be “more like a wedding. I’d like to be followed to my grave by a string of beautiful girls carrying roses, each attended by a charming and ardent lover.” She should hate, she added, “to be seen off by people who looked like hell and depressed each other.”52 In February 1973, Bowen was back in Hythe, and after a last visit to the site of Bowen’s Court with a busload of nuns and acolytes, she entered the hospital again with pneumonia and a foot injury that never healed. Here she was surrounded by her closest companions: Audrey Fiennes, her favorite cousin; Isaiah Berlin and Cyril Connolly, longtime friends; Veronica Wedgwood and Ursula Vernon, close friends in later life; and Rosamond Lehmann, who was with her a great deal in her last years. The day after Bowen’s death, Eudora Welty wrote to William Maxwell that she had meant to write not knowing Bowen was so ill, yet admiring always, and remembering “a grand time” they had a few years back on New Year’s. In these last weeks, Bowen lost her stutter and then, completely, her voice. Charles Ritchie spent the last two weeks of her life with her, visiting the hospital daily. He remembered, as Bowen did, the brilliant roses in Regent’s Park that drew them together the day they met in 1941.53 That garden, he said, “with its burning gaiety, stayed in both their minds like an apparition” that she later transformed into fiction. “‘Hundreds of standard roses bloomed,’ she would write in one of the wondrous word pictures in her story, ‘over-charged with colour, as though this were their one hour. Crimson, coral, blue-pink, lemon and cold white, they disturbed with fragrance the dead air.’”54 Ritchie re-experienced the garden through her sensibility as he had daily life through her imagination. One day Ritchie arrived at the hospital and uncorked a bottle of champagne with his usual élan, and they drank their last glass together. After her death on February 22, 1973, her body was transported from University Hospital in London to Ireland for burial. Farahy locals went up to Cork airport to meet her coffin. In a final will, Bowen had written that she wanted to be buried in the Farahy churchyard. Eudora Welty observed that 316 P. Laurence “her heart turned straight back to Ireland in this last year” and related Audrey Fiennes’ description of the funeral: “It was beautiful and moving—the country people came in crowds with flowers—they looked—Audrey’s word, “dedicated”—Charles was with her up to the last.”55 Fiona Shaw narrated the funeral on the BBC as Bowen’s body came into Cork, and local people joined the funeral cortege holding scarce winter blossoms: snow was falling, and it was by torchlight that they brought the coffin up to the lonely Farahy churchyard, where her father, Henry Cole Bowen, and her husband, Alan Cameron, were buried.56 The snow and the churchyard, evocative of one of Bowen’s favorite passages in literature, was heard “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”57 Post Script When the issue of establishing a memorial to Bowen was discussed three years after her death, the reservoir of feeling in Eire about her espionage activities in Ireland at the beginning of the war, as well as the social position of her Anglo-Irish family, erupted again. In May 1976, the Reverend Robert Brian MacCarthy proposed the transfer of Farahy Church to commemorate the life and work of Elizabeth Bowen. He followed this with an appeal to Bowen’s friend, Derek Hill, to help with the rescue of the church, as well as enlisting others to help financially in the preservation of the modest church that Bowen usually attended when at Bowen’s Court. “I was horrified to find holes in the roof, window panes broken and a general air of post-atomic bomb about the place.”58 Would there be about 50 people, he queried, who would be prepared to subscribe to the project at £25 each? The initial absence of support for the project was glaring: from Bowen’s family executor, Gilbert Butler, the bishop of Cork, Cork citizens, and the “trendy” Arts Council (which eventually donated). Gilbert Butler was in conflict with Hubert Butler and the preservation committee, which staunchly supported the proposal, and the diocese had complications about transferring the ownership of the unused church. According to Reverend MacCarthy, Gilbert protested MacCarthy’s daring to erect a memorial plaque in the church with “Mrs. Cameron” inscribed on it when they had just “had an official biography done” of Bowen. (Presumably, he had commissioned Victoria Glendinning’s biography.)59 Reverend MacCarthy defended his passionate effort to save the church, as it was “the last physical reminder of the Bowens 11 A Frightened Heart 317 in Ireland” and Bowen’s writings and the plaque was respectful of “its character as a place of worship, that being the role in which it occupies an important place in Bowen’s writing.”60 His request to the diocesan secretary in Cork included the promise “that the church should be left very much as it is since it positively exudes that austere quality of Irish Anglicanism that Elizabeth Bowen has so well conveyed in Bowen’s Court,” and the altar a memorial to Bowen’s mother and her uncle who died on the Titanic. But money was needed to repair holes in the roof and to prepare the vestry for assemblage photos, along with the use of Hill’s painting Bowen’s Court, then owned by the Colley family at Mill House, Dublin. Reverend MacCarthy reported on the progress of repairs on the site in 1978, finding “the one remaining protestant farmer engaged in mending the holes in the church roof,” and he enlisted others to work for little or nothing. There were those who supported the project in a letter to the Times: Spencer Curtis Brown, Rosamond Lehmann, and Raymond Mortimer. But the Irish Times literary editor, Terence de Vere White, thinking the project impractical and Bowen, no moral model, warned that “hers is hardly a name that will draw many pilgrims.”61 MacCarthy noted that he was waiting for Hill’s promised £300 contribution, and others: Ritchie, £100 plus an earlier gift; the Esme Mitchell Trust in Belfast, £500; the Arts Council, £100 (one-third of what was initially committed); and contributions from Southern Tourism, Georgian Society members, and friends such as the Blacks and the Vernons. The church was financially preserved, mainly by Bowen’s friends in Anglo-Irish circles. MacCarthy concluded in a letter to Hill that the collection of funds for such a modest memorial “in any environment other than that of Southern Ireland … would be likely to present no insuperable obstacles.” He implied to Hill,” knowing the scene as you do,” that he understood the hostility toward the Bowens, symbolic of Anglo-Irish exploitation in Ireland, and Bowen, the literary daughter, who, from their perspective, took sides against the Irish, investigating their “neutrality.”62 He also wryly added, “Heaven preserve us from the Protestant death-wish,” implying that Gilbert Butler’s resistance to this kind of memorial for Bowen would have ensured the disappearance of the memory of her and her ancestors in Farahy. MacCarthy, no stranger to controversy even in his opinions on the church in Ireland today, prevailed with the Preservation Committee and those who sustain it, Jane and Patrick Annesley. On October 18, 1979, in the repaired St. Colman’s Church, a Bowen memorial plaque was unveiled by Gilbert Butler, along with memorial photos of Bowen’s Court in the vestry (Fig. 11.3). 318 P. Laurence Fig. 11.3 St. Colman’s Church, Farahy Bowen, one imagines, would have appreciated this memorial in her beloved Church, but would turn a gimlet eye upon the moniker, “wife of Alan Cameron,” and the limited description of her writing. She would have understood much, though said little, about the people and the history surrounding this modest memorial, given her own “cloven-heart,” split always among Irish, English, and European loves and loyalties. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. TR, 64. CR journal, October 20, 1970, LCW, 465. EB to CR, Jan. 29, 1958. LCW 196. TR, 4ff. Jean Santeuil, 534. EB to CR, October 26, 1947. LCW, 109–110. TR, 74ff, 64. EB to L.P. Hartley, June 7, 1961, JRUL, MS Letters. L.P. Hartley to EB, April 3, 1955, HRC 11.5. Fuller discussion of reviews in Hepburn, introduction, WWF, xv–xxxii. L.P. Hartley to EB, August 12, 1935, HRC 11.5. 11 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. A Frightened Heart 319 Jessica Rathdonnell, interview by PL, Dublin, June 2011. EB to HH, May 28, 1936, HHC. RM to EB, February 22, 1949. HRC 11.6. EB to Westminster Bank, Harpenden, November 6, 1944, HRC 10.5. Reported in WWF, xix (based on HRC 12.5–6). EB to CR, November 6, 1946, LCW, 99. Alexander, William Plomer, 265. Curtis Brown Files, Folder 1. Curtis Brown files, folder 1 and 2. EB to CR, January 19, 1962, LCW, 382. Proust, Swann’s Way, 59–60. LG, 10, 20, 130. Ibid., 20, 130. Audrey Fiennes reported that Bowen often used difficult words as a child. Bowen, “Charity,” CS, 195. CS, 231, 234, 232. See Renee C. Hoogland, “Technologies of Female Adolescence.” Editors’ footnote, EB to CR, August 12, 1964, LCW, 425. EB to DH, August 8, 1965, JRUL, MS Letters. Londonderry Sentinel, January 13, 1971. Bowen, Nativity Play, 130, 143. Hill, “Letter from Ireland,” 270. Arnold, Derek Hill, 263. IB to Cressida Bonham Carter, August 28, 1938, Berlin, Flourishing, 278. Arnold, Derek Hill, 271. Arnold, Derek Hill, 275ff., and Arnold interview. Connolly, “Comment.” ET, 80, 95. Iris Murdoch to EB, n.d. (ca. 1968), HRC 11.6. ET, 80, 42. Bowen, “Look at All Those Roses,” CS, 515. Welty, What There is to Say…., April 12, 1983. John Bayley to EB, n.d., HRC 10.6. Bowen, “The Move-In,” PC, 67–76. EB to WP, September 1, 1970, DUR 19. EB to CR, September 22, 1969, LCW, 459. EB to WP, September 1, 1970, DUR 19. EB to C.V. Wedgwood, December 17, 1959, BOD, MS. C6289-41. Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time. Molly Keane, “Life with the Lid Off,” September 28, 1989, panel, NSA. EB to CR, September 1, 1955, LCW, 214. CR journal, August 13, 1973, LCW, 472. Bowen, “Look at All Those Roses,” CS, 514. 320 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. P. Laurence Welty to William Maxwell, …., April 16, 1973, 302. Fiona Shaw, “Sunday Feature: Radio 3,” 1993, NSA. Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners, 124. R.B. MacCarthy, letter to DH, August 22, 1975, PRONI D/4400/C/2/28. Ibid., July 16, 1979. Ibid., letter to the diocesan secretary, May 12, 1976. Terence de Vere White to R. B. MacCarthy, November 19, 1975, PRONI D/6600/C/2/28. 62. R. B. MacCarthy to DH, July 16, 1979, PRONI D/4400/C/C/2/28.