The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Masterpieces in miniature
A new collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s tales proves she was the ‘supreme genius’ of short fiction, says John Banville
As a novelist, Elizabeth Bowen was as good as, if not better than, the best of her English contemporaries; but as a practitioner of the shorter form she was the supreme genius of her time. Revisiting her Collected Stories, one burns with envy for those readers who have still to come to them for the first time. There is not a story in this substantial volume, from the first to the last, that is not brought off beautifully, and many in which she outdid herself: the elusive but vividly immediate “Summer Night”; the haunting “Mysterious Kôr” and the haunted “The Demon Lover”; the trance-like wartime set-pieces “Ivy Gripped the Steps” and “The Happy Autumn Fields”; the forlorn “Joining Charles”; and the merely – merely! – marvellous early tales, “Daffodils” and “The Parrot”.
In praising Bowen’s mastery of the short story, it would be a grave error, and a graver injustice, to imply that she was not a novelist of the subtlest talent. The Last September, written in her late twenties, is a bravura demonstration of her early powers, a work rich in metaphor, sumptuous landscape painting and forensic, beady-eyed characterisation. Although she declared herself dead-set against the notion of art as selfexpression, this novel is, as she confessed, autobiographical in significant aspects. In particular, the setting, Danielstown, a substantial mansion secluded among the soft folds of north County Cork’s hill country, is closely modelled on Bowen’s Court, the author’s ancestral home near Kildorrery.
Being Anglo-Irish, Elizabeth Bowen always felt her true place was a point in the Irish Sea halfway between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead. She was born in Dublin, in Herbert Place, a once noble Georgian terrace facing the Grand Canal. Her early years she wrote about in an admirably un-misty-eyed memoir, Seven Winters, while her abiding love of County Cork is recorded in Bowen’s Court, a book that, though a notable work in its own right, might be considered the nonfiction counterpart of The Last September.
Bowen’s Court was almost as significant for the novelist as the people who lived in it. A fine house it was, three-storeyed, many-windowed, not ostentatious but solidly aware of its status as a bastion of bienpensant Protestant folk long settled in the midst of a not entirely accepting Catholic majority – there is still a nationalist rump in that part of Cork which insists Elizabeth Bowen cannot be considered in any way an “Irish” author.
It is not hard to understand local resentment against the “Big House”. In the catastrophic famines of the 1840s, families such as the Bowens would have been regarded with deep bitterness as parasites feeding upon a land writhing in the throes of countless death agonies. Elizabeth Bowen’s greatgrandmother opened a soup kitchen in Bowen’s Court to feed the starving: some of these poor wretches died trying to crawl up to the house, and were buried in a famine pit in a corner of the local churchyard.
Whatever the people in the farms and cottages roundabout may have thought, the house, like many such, was, in its earlier days at least, hardly conducive to gracious living. It had to wait until the early Fifties, and the commercial success of Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day, to be fitted with bathrooms – a Bowen in the 19th century had installed two lavatories, but given the state of plumbing generally in such houses, one prefers not to entertain the thought of what condition the WCs were in by Elizabeth’s time.
In 1959, Bowen sold the house to a local businessman. Molly O’Brien, who had worked “below
owen’s people were wellto-do Protestants, particularly on her mother’s side. Florence Bowen née Colley was raised in the stately but somewhat dour Mount Temple, on the coastal outskirts of Dublin. Florence’s mother was by all accounts something of a termagant, with a keen sense of social boundaries. Elizabeth’s father-to-be, Henry Bowen, was a barrister and therefore acceptable to her as a contender for her daughter’s hand: had he been a mere solicitor he would have been beyond the pale.
Henry Bowen was a striking figure, well over 6ft, with brooding good looks that the
Brontë sisters would have appreciated. He was highly strung, and as a lawyer employed by the British civil service in
Ireland he worked hard – so hard, indeed, that he suffered a nervous breakdown when Elizabeth was a child, and for the rest of his life was beset by bouts of what was in those days called mania.
Henry’s wife was handsome, a little fey, somewhat scattered, but she gave to her only child what Elizabeth regarded as the best start in life, namely, the sure knowledge of being unconditionally loved. After Henry’s first breakdown, doctors advised that mother and daughter should absent themselves from Bowen’s Court, not for their sake, but for the sake of the ailing Henry. When Elizabeth was seven, therefore, she and Florence went off to England, where they were to stay for nearly six years, living the “villa life”, which they both adored, in places such as Folkestone, Seabrook and Hythe.
But the idyll, like most idylls, came to a sad end: Florence was stricken with cancer, and was told that she had six months to live. This was the moment when she showed her mettle, greeting the dire prognosis with perfect aplomb, telling her sister-in-law that she had received the good news that she would soon know what Heaven was like. She died at Hythe in 1912. Elizabeth was 13.
Years before, when Elizabeth was a small child and her father’s nerves collapsed, she had learned the Irish Protestant trick of determinedly not noticing the most dreadful events; now that skill was called on again, in greater measure. She bore her loss with remarkable, perhaps too remarkable, fortitude; the tensions and trials of her father’s illness had caused her to develop a stammer – which when she was an adult many people found endearing, even attractive – and from now on the word that most often caught
In 1840s Cork, families such as the Bowens would have been regarded as parasites
her up was “Mother”.
Yet we must beware cheap psychologising, as Elizabeth Bowen herself was always careful to do. She was a determined survivor, and although it may seem callous to say so, these early tragedies were not entirely tragic in that they went into the making of her both as a formidable “lady” – she was at ease at all social levels – and a writer.
She understood the solitary nature of her artistic calling, and accepted its consequences. She once observed to the short-story writer and critic VS Pritchett that it would have been perfectly possible for both of them to be gregarious and jolly, which would probably have made them nicer people – but not writers.
Although Bowen passed much of her life in London – she and her complaisant and unfailingly caring husband Alan Cameron occupied a house in Clarence Terrace near Regent’s Park – an essential part of her imagination was fixed permanently at Bowen’s Court. It is striking how many of her stories feature houses of strong character – some of them stronger, in fact, than the characters inhabiting them – while many tales open with a meticulous and carefully nuanced evocation of a specific landscape, season, even, in some cases, the time of day. She is as alive to the play of light and shade as a Dutch painter of the Golden Age.
Consider the opening paragraph of that mysteriously beautiful, sad
masterpiece, “Summer Night”, the action of which takes place in an easily identifiable County Cork: observing the action and the atmosphere through the eyes of an ever-attentive orphaned girl. This sense of things in hiding behind other things is one of the most abiding leitmotifs in all these stories, even the sunniest of them. Their author knew how it felt to be an only child in a big house, straining through her ears towards the sound of nearby adults about their incomprehensible doings – to a child, all grown-ups seem slightly mad.
Ireland in general, but especially the rural Ireland of Bowen’s youth, is steeped in the uncanny. The isle is full of noises. How must it have been for that little girl, lying at night in bed in the nursery above the drawing-room, watching the shadows of leaves a-tremble on the ceiling and thinking of the famine folk of old dying on the grassy verges of the front drive? On occasion she went hungry herself, due not to neglect by her parents but simply their vague detachment from the common requirements of
Collected Stories by Elizabeth Bowen is published by Everyman at £18.99
characters view a London crouched in wait for the bombers as a place as fantastical as the fabled city in Rider Haggard’s She, one of Bowen’s favourite novels:
ears ago, I was about to switch off the television when the next programme started; a documentary study of occupied France during the Second World War, shot in black and white. Four and a half hours later, it finished, leaving me astonished, in awe and convinced that the film I had just seen, Marcel Ophuls’s Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), was a masterpiece. Having re-watched it half a dozen times since, I would argue that it is the greatest documentary ever made.
Ophuls was commissioned to make the film in 1967, for broadcast on TV around the 25th anniversary of the Liberation, in 1969. When, after two years of filming, he showed the material to network executives, they were horrified and refused to screen it. France had been difficult to unite after the Germans were thrown out, because of the extent of collaboration; scores were settled in an often unjust and primitive fashion; the Fifties had been a time of political turbulence, calmed only by the establishment of a new republic under the authoritarian rule of Charles de Gaulle.
But his France was unified around a series of myths, namely: that the French had worked to liberate themselves; that collaboration had been kept to a minimum; that there had been scant participation in the genocide of the Jews; and that the Nazis’ puppet regime based in Vichy was little more than a bad dream. In exploding those myths, Le chagrin et la pitié caused outrage. Shown in cinemas in Germany, Britain and America in the early Seventies, the film was nominated for an Oscar in 1972: French critics who saw it were dumbfounded. When it was eventually broadcast on French television in 1981, it still provoked anger.
Ophuls’s methods were simple. He focused on ClermontFerrand, near Vichy and in the zone administered by Pétain and his sidekick Laval, interviewing mainly local people. There are genuine résistants who describe the wicked acts of their occupiers; but there are too many others who did little more than turn the proverbial blind eye. In perhaps the film’s most shocking scene, two teachers, 25 or 26 years after the event, become vague about their memories of the day in 1942 when they went to school and found all the
Jewish boys had disappeared. As if the two events were not connected, one observes that several of those missing boys now had streets named after them.
There is an interview with a shopkeeper who regards his main achievement of the war as managing to convince his fellow French that although his name was Klein, he was not Jewish. There is a long conversation with Christian de la Mazière, an aristocrat who decided to join the Charlemagne division of the Waffen SS to fight for Hitler. And, perhaps most nauseating of all, is le comte de Chambrun, Laval’s son-in-law, who does his best to convince his interlocutors that France had been lucky to have this arch-collaborator as its prime minister. It is not just the interviewing that is superb, the camerawork is brilliant, too. The director is sure to capture the shifty, sideways glances of Klein and Chambrun as they try to justify themselves, and the casualness of Mazière – looking louche in dark glasses as he puts his own disgrace down to the folly of youth.
Ophuls also lined up the greats to recall these events: notably Anthony Eden, speaking elegant, interestingly accented French, and Pierre Mendès France, the former French prime minister, a Jew whom Vichy sought to try on trumped-up charges of desertion.
By the end of his film, the myths are in ruins; and Ophuls’s last joke is to show a clip of Maurice Chevalier explaining, entirely dishonestly, to an anglophone audience how he had not collaborated. Chevalier, like too many others in this film, got away with it in the way that the résistants often did not. As he sings Sweepin’ the Clouds Away, one recalls the ease with which a whole nation went into denial only, eventually, to be forced out of it by a courageous film-maker.