« In Which Elizabeth Bowen Lives In Windowless Rooms »

Don't Bat An Eyelid

by JANE HU

I bussed down to New York City this past week in hopes of extracting some form of a mini-break before the start of school. The city posed as a welcome escape from my summer of windowless offices and libraries, where I scoured databases and watched films in unventilated screening rooms. On the ride over, between fantasizing about the parks I would breeze around, I sent my professor an e-mail: "I just wanted to let you know I'm in NYC for this week. If there's anything I can do here in relation to Bowen, etc. let me know!"

I am writing my thesis on Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen and, wherever I go, she always haunts the back of my mind. Incidentally, there were manuscripts to be found at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which was precisely where I spent the majority of my mini-break.

A lover of archives, I was seven when I received my first diary and have kept one ever since. I recall years when I wouldn’t sleep without logging an entry — the day could only end after my written acknowledgement. Past my bedtime, crouched under the covers, I would blindly scrawl out notes of apparent insignificance. "My piano test is over and I’m very happy." "I just came home from Bingo! Tonight I did not win anything but oh well." "Something is wrong with my watch." I’ve always believed in documenting life and perhaps Bowen said it best: "Those without memories don’t know what is what."

Born 1899 in Dublin, Bowen spent the first seven years of her life migrating between Bowen’s Court, her large family house in County Cork, and her home in Dublin. Growing up, the Bowens kept a close eye on Elizabeth’s development: she was never to drink too much milk; she was always to wear gloves to avoid freckling. Elizabeth was also not allowed to learn to read until she was seven since it was common knowledge that Bowen’s overworked their brains. Part of this may have held some truth for her father, a lawyer, suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. Elizabeth was around five when he took for the worse, yet she arose nearly unscathed: "I had come out of the tension and mystery of my father’s illness, the apprehensive silence or chaotic shoutings... with nothing more disastrous than a stammer." Perhaps it was this stammer that contributed to Bowen’s inimitable style — a use of inverted syntax that never includes a single unnecessary word.

Bowen's densely psychological narratives carried the sensibilities of nineteenth-century realism into modernism, where her twisted sentences emphasized the uncanny aspects of daily existence. My favorite prose of hers is found in her 1935 novel The House in Paris, where Karen delivers an internal monologue on her already thwarted future. Bowen exposes Karen’s conceptual twists of time and memory in labyrinthine sentences that you cannot help but indulge in:

These hours are only hours. They cannot be again, but no hours can. Hours in a room with a lamp and a tree outside, with tomorrow eating into them. The grass sprang up when we took our hands away. The maid will make this bed and fold back two corners of eiderdown like they were folded back when I put my hat on it.... I cannot see him to see what a child would be like. Though there will not be a child, that is why I want to see him. If a child were going to be born, there would still be something that had to be. Tonight would be more then than hours and that lamp. It would have been the hour of my death. I should have to do what I dread, see them know. There would still be something to dread. I should see the hour in the child. I should not have rushed on to nothing. He would be the mark our hands did not leave on the grass, he would be the tamarisks we only half saw. And he would be the I whose bed Naomi sat on, the Max whose sleeve I brushed rain off: tender and guardable.

Following Henry James, whom she frequently emulated, Bowen believed in "the treatment of an incident, crisis, or, situation which the writer feels to be of greater importance than its apparent triviality might show." Because she valued tradition and good manners, readers often judge her as a snobbish conservative. These critics miss Bowen’s acute sense of empathy, which evince her open progressiveness. On the declining institution of the Irish manor, she reveals her social intuition:

Or is it the fear that, if one goes into the big house, one will have to be ‘polite’? Well, why not be polite—are not humane manners the crown of being human at all? Politeness is not constriction; it is a grace: it is really no worse than an exercise of the imagination on other people’s behalf. And are we to cut grace quite out of life?

If you’ve heard Bowen’s name, it was most likely from an encounter with her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart  or 1949's The Heat of the Day. Both energetically plotted and cohesive narratives, these two works have grown to become her most well known. In the latter, Bowen registers the violent shifts experienced in the two world wars, the Troubles, and the Irish Civil War. Her war fiction portrays sleepwalkers who, although not dead, were neither fully alive. Aside from her novels, which are read less than they should, Bowen is also one of the most underrated short story writers of this century. Whereas longer narratives allow for full-length character development, Bowen used the compressed quality of short fiction to create more fantastical and metonymic worlds. Her prominent ability to create an atmosphere of tension and tautness cuts most clearly in the shorter works. Here, the quiet ghosts and haunted figures of her novels emerge as full-blown, speaking phantoms.

All romantic notions aside, Bowen viewed herself as a professional writer who worked steadily at her desk throughout the day. On top of writing fiction, which Bowen equated to living life, she also published numerous essays and articles. Responsible for both her London house in Regent’s Park and the inherited Bowen’s Court, Bowen needed her writing to earn a profit.

bowen's court

By the late 1930s, Bowen had reached an international reputation that continued to grow into the 1940s. Although her essays produced a significant amount of her income, Bowen nonetheless felt her journalism as subordinate to her fiction. Even late in life, she rejected her status as a critic: "I do not really consider myself a critic – I do not think, really, that a novelist should be a critic; but, by some sort of irresistible force, criticism seems to come almost every novelist’s way. I write, at intervals, for The New Statesman, The Listener, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar; and do request articles, from time to time, for papers too diverse to enumerate."

Since her death in 1973, interest and scholarship in Bowen has waned, although there seems to have been a revival this past decade. Victoria Glendinning’s foreword to her excellent biography on Bowen properly states, "She is to be spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf, on whom much more breath has been expended." Glendinning goes on to acknowledge that Bowen is what came after Bloomsbury. "She is the link which connects Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."

My first Bowen novel was The Death of the Heart, where I met the intelligent orphan Portia in all her sixteen years of bright innocence. Nineteen myself at the time, I encountered Portia’s utter artlessness with uncomfortable familiarity. Having already fallen for the female protagonists of Edith Wharton and Henry James, who, for me, exemplified heartbreaking innocence, it was clear that Portia belonged to the same breath as Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Lily Bart. Portia was fragile and stubborn, hopeful and despairing, curious while asking all the wrong questions. Similar to how I felt at sixteen, Portia was full of an unself-awareness that simultaneously melted with her own self-importance. So overwhelmingly innocent, she could not perceive the mess she made for those around her.

Portia keeps a saccharine diary that gets covertly passed between adults and which consequently lands under the reader’s eyes too. I cringed through each of these entries in a way that only happens when one encounters oneself caught off-guard; I might have been rereading my own not-so-distant maudlin thoughts. Portia is mistakenly — but predictably — in love with a cad named Eddie and she writes, “He says he had lunch with Anna and that she was nice. He says he did think of ringing me up, but he did not. He does not say why. He says he feels he is starting a new life.” And like many young girls, Portia finds sweetness in the mundane:

After supper, I sat on our rug in front of Thomas’ fire. I thought some of the things that Eddie had told me on this rug.
His father is a builder.
When he was a child he knew pieces of the Bible straight off by heart.
He is quite afraid of the dark.
His two favourite foods are cheese straws and jellied consommé.  
He would not really like to be very rich.
He says that when you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
He does not like being laughed at, so he pretends he wants people to laugh at him.
He has thirty-six ties.

Although she goes on painfully for pages about the undeserving Eddie, Portia’s diary reveals glimpses of the discerning woman she will become: "Thomas said he did not know what had put this into his head and after that he gave me a sort of look when he did not think I was looking."

In A.S. Byatt’s introduction to The House in Paris, she asserts "that Elizabeth Bowen has got Henrietta right. Adult readers are given to saying, of children like Henrietta, that ‘real’ children are not so sophisticated, so articulate, so thoughtful. What I remember with absolute clarity from this reading was a feeling that the private analyses I made to myself of things were vindicated, the confusions I was aware of were real, and presumably important and interesting, since here they were described." Bowen’s words reassured me that a sixteen year-old girl’s perspective and opinions mattered. While her fiction was forever concerned with young girlhood, her journalistic work included portraits on the emerging population of "teenagers." While this rising community struck many adults as tragic and foreign, Bowen strove to understand them. Her novels are evidence of her success.

Since The Death of the Heart, I have read both Bowen’s fictional letters and those she wrote in real life to Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, Charles Ritchie, and many others. She was a voracious letter writer and would easily send out a dozen before the lunch bell rang. Writing between the two world wars, Bowen lived through a time of enormous upheaval as gramophones, typewriters, and cinema rose in ubiquity. Not surprisingly, she often viewed the idea of immediate communication as a threat to privacy and society: "The motor car demolishes distances, and the telephone and wireless keep the house knit up, perhaps too much, with the world."

Wherever Bowen travelled, she contemplated the force of memory and the past. "In Rome I wondered how to break down the barrier between myself and happenings outside my memory. I was looking for splinters of actuality in a shifting mass of experience other than my own. Time is one kind of space; it creates distance." As I read her letters in the Berg Collection and hold the pages she once touched, I feel a similar collapse of distance between me and the writer I love. I embrace the honeyed corniness and romanticism of the whole scenario and, suddenly, Bowen feels present. Somewhere along her nearly-illegible cursive, I see both the vulnerability of Elizabeth Bowen, Portia, and myself.

I have kept a diary for fourteen years now and, maybe because I am less innocent or more “sophisticated,” "articulate," and "thoughtful," I no longer tear out pages that present me in an undesirable light. Other times, in a bout of inspiration, I will flip out my stationary, thumb through the drawer for stamps, and pen a few cards until my hand begins to cramp and my thoughts start to drift. At this point, I’ll pull out To the North, which features my favorite Bowen lady, Emmeline. She is the magnetic character Bowen believed every story required — the one with whom we’re supposed to fall in love. Needless to say, I fell.

Bowen’s young women "play in a foreign language of which they know not one word," all the while discouraged by laughably smug boys to "Lock everything up; hide everything! Don’t bat an eyelid ever." This faulty advice never works. Bowen’s guileless girls write as a way of becoming. Late one night, Portia cries about the adults who dictate her life, "They would forgive me if I were something special. But I don’t know what I was meant to be." I'm twenty-one now and with each passing day, I don't relate less to Portia, but more.

Jane Hu is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

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Comments

[Kevin Longrie]

Bowen is painfully under-read. She is phenomenal, involving, and plenty of other adjectives. The Last September is the first novel of hers I read, and since then I've been devouring the rest. Ms. Hu, you're grand.

[Kevin Longrie]

That comment was often grammatically incorrect and syntactically irresponsible. I apologize for those things. I'm quite tired and beyond the point of comprehensible sentences or copy-editing.