The Flight of the Hawk: An Introduction to Elizabeth Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr”

Elizabeth Bowen was a great conversationalist who stammered and a great observer who was very shortsighted. She hated wearing her glasses, and the impressionistic quality of her writing can be partly attributed to this reluctance, which left the more distant world blurred. Also, perhaps the intensity with which she noted details—she had to look closely to make sense of things. The British philosopher Stuart Hampshire describes Bowen in a garden at dusk. Talking hard, she walked straight into a hedge and, still talking, backed out, he said, “like a bus.” Later, during the war, she once served coffee on the balcony of her London house without noticing that an air raid was in progress. As for the stammer, she negotiated that by using hand gestures, or choosing new words; often, when she was lecturing or appearing on television, it was barely noticeable, and when it was, people found it charming. A rich friend once paid for her to see a psychiatrist in the hope of curing it, but the psychiatrist, after a few sessions, poured out his secrets to Bowen, rather than vice versa. Is it merely fanciful to think that her stammer, like her myopia, contributed to her famous style? She hesitates, she feints, she circumnavigates, she reaches for first one word, then another; almost always, she avoids the obvious. Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth’s senior by seventeen years, writes in Moments of Being how much more vivid the present is when the past is pressed up against it. Bowen, for good or ill, was born into a family where the past was inescapable. Her father, Henry Bowen, was large, gentle, and courteous: “If he saw men as trees walking,” Bowen mysteriously wrote, “he bowed to the trees.” According to family legend, one of his ancestors, a lieutenant-colonel in Cromwell’s army, had been granted by Cromwell as much land in County Cork as a hawk could fly over. Several generations later, a house was built on the land, and the first Bowens moved into Bowen’s Court in 1776. Henry inherited the house in 1889, the year after he passed the bar. The year after that he married Florence Colley of Clontarf. Elizabeth, their only child, was born nine years later, in 1899. From her earliest memories, Elizabeth was in motion, and her characters are too. Her stories and novels are full of entrances and exits, greetings and farewells, and her meticulous sense of how setting—where we