Elizabeth Bowen

A Literary Life

Patricia Laurence

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030264154
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen's writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O'Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, is laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.

© The Author(s) 2019

P. LaurenceElizabeth BowenLiterary Liveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26415-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Patricia Laurence¹

(1)

City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Patricia Laurence

End Abstract

Two Paths

The day Elizabeth Bowen began her late-life memoir, she took a walk around Hythe, England, looking for a road she had known 60 years earlier. It was there. Not a soul was on it. “Nothing of its character was gone. The May Saturday morning was transiently, slightly hysterically sunny, with a chill undertone.”¹ Such scenes “cast themselves on the screen as a silent film: I have a wonderful visual memory,” said Bowen, “but I remember the conversations […] hardly at all.”²

This biography will recover some of those conversations, but begins on terra firma, two paths that reveal terrains of her imagination and aspects of her personality. First, the path by her ancestral estate, Bowen’s Court in Kildorrery, Ireland, that both imprinted the past and immersed her in Anglo-Irish traditions; then, a path along a row of seaside villas on the coast of Hythe, England, a landscape that nurtured the farouche, her untamed qualities. She loved Hythe’s “villas with white balconies, bow-windows so rotund that they stuck out like towers, steps up the garden, rustic arbours and Dorothy Perkins roses bright in the sea glare.”³ This was Kent’s dramatic coastline, which stood in contrast to the green, sprawling expanse of Bowen’s Court: here Bowen was not in the shadow of the mountains of Kildorrery, but rather on bald downs that “showed exciting great gashes of white chalk.”⁴ On a clear day,” she said of Hythe, “the whole of this area meets the eye: there are no secrets”(Figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4).

Fig. 1.1

Hythe Seaside Villas, England. Rights holder, courtesy of P. Laurence

Fig. 1.2

Hythe Seaside. Rights holder, courtesy of P. Laurence

Fig. 1.3

Surrounding grounds, Bowen’s Court Rights holder, courtesy of P. Laurence

Fig. 1.4

Bowen’s Court, Kildorrery Ireland. Rights holder, courtesy of P. Laurence

Bowen’s Court, however, had its secrets. The grand house, with its history of ten generations of Bowens, grounded her itinerant childhood, but also revealed her Anglo-Irish family’s infatuation with a “will to power” as well as the taint of Bowen family “madness.” It stood there, a place of peace beneath the low-hanging clouds, amidst acres of green, surrounded by woods and the purple of the Ballyhoura, Kilworth, and Blackwater Mountains. Bowen allowed few doubts about the solidity of these childhood places in her early memoir, Seven Winters: “No years, subsequently, are so acute. … The happenings […] are those that I shall remain certain of till I die.”⁵ Yet she cautioned that this early memoir was “as much of my life story as I intend to write—that is, to write directly.”

Though these paths mark Bowen’s girlhood, they do not fix her. She, often in flight from these places—her self shifting—remains elusive. “Who am I?” queries a character in a Virginia Woolf novel, “it depends so much upon the room.” In Bowen’s case, many rooms, people and places created her, and as she grew into a writer, she fiercely compartmentalized her finely wrought self. It led to her rejection of the genre of autobiography and biography. “Most people do better to keep their traps shut,” she warned after reading the autobiographies of her friends Stephen Spender and John Lehmann.⁶ As for biographers she asserted that they are ”misguided by the notion of a fixed or coherent life [, that] generally falsifies.”⁷ People can never be fully known, she reflected, an observation that transferred to her characters. In an interview with Jocelyn Brooke, Bowen confessed that she also found it somewhat boring to remember childhood facts or chronologies—the voluntary recall and smooth timeline upon which a traditional autobiography or biography relies. Life is full of irresolution, and memory comes only in patches, she said, remembering Proust. Consequently, a biographer or autobiographer resorts to producing a “synthetic experience […] only half true,” and is unable to come up with the valued “nugget of pure truth.”⁸

Biography is an unruly venture. A linear or coherent telling of a life, then, does not accord with Bowen’s philosophy and style of being, living, and writing. Following her lead, this biography presents a life that spotlights scenes or offers glimpses of her hidden faces and unexplained aspects of her life. It presents her flickering “I”s—a modernist stance—rather than a conventional story. She was a public intellectual, spy, air-raid warden, ambassador, essayist, scriptwriter, and journalist and writer of split Anglo-Irish identity. Like Lois, a young woman coming of age in 1920s Ireland in The Last September, “she was fitted for […] being twice as complex” as someone from an earlier generation, “for she must be double[,] as many people having gone into the making of her.”⁹ Her life then as a writer was a companion spirit to her life as a woman.

Preserving Silences

In the last years of her life, Bowen was provoked to write parts of her autobiography when she found some accounts “wildly off the mark.” She thought, “[I]f anybody must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen,” and she began Pictures and Conversations, a fragmentary work, published posthumously.¹⁰ Bowen remained, nevertheless, jealous of her privacy, and wrote to her friend Francis King at the end of her life that “as a succession of experiences, and my reaction to them, it clearly must have some connection with the stories I write but that is a connection I should find damagingly public to explore.”¹¹

Bowen’s observations about biography emerged in 1950s England, a time when the genre seemingly demanded an orderly and chronological story but allowing, however, unacknowledged gaps about a subject’s sexuality. The topic was taboo. This was before Michael Holroyd radicalized the genre by exposing the sex life of Lytton Strachey in a groundbreaking biography that appeared in 1967, the same year as the passage of the Wolfenden Act, which decriminalized homosexuality and prostitution in England. At that time, the cult of personality, which prevails today when authors become celebrities, had not yet surfaced in interviews and public presentations in the media. Bowen famously rejected a PEN interview with the remark, “Even to my friends, I do not find that I talk much, often or easily about my writing. As for the outside world, I never can see why I should. Why can’t they just read my books if they care to—and leave it at that.”

Having little faith in the genre, Bowen controlled her archive, ensuring private gaps about her life. The major collection that she sold to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas preserves mainly correspondence and manuscripts relating to her work, eclipsing personal information and details of romantic relationships. It is a product that, as Beckett said in another context, is “complete with missing parts.”¹² We have, for example, only half of the correspondence with her friend and lover, Charles Ritchie: the passionate letters she wrote to him; much of his side is lost as he destroyed the intimate passages he wrote when his letters were returned to him. Also missing is what she wrote to him after the death of her husband, her depression after the sale of Bowen’s Court, her expression of her wish to live there with Ritchie, and increasing resentment of his married life. All remain undocumented and only hinted at. That is as she wished it to be.

And so there are silences that not only she but also her editors and estate preserved. In the valuable collection of Bowen and Ritchie’s private correspondence and journals, Love’s Civil War, edited by Judith Robertson and Victoria Glendinning, ellipses, at times, are inserted by the editors for reasons of clarity, length, or tact; at other times, Bowen or Ritchie inserted them in their own letters and journals in the interest of privacy. Literary agents in Bowen’s time also influenced what information was publishable. Even though some taboos were dismantled in the 1960s, Bowen’s first biographer, Victoria Glendinning, was subject to sexual censorship in 1973 by Bowen’s agent, Curtis Brown. Thirty-two years later, Glendinning wrote a letter to The Times’ editor, explaining that the agent had urged her “clean up” the Sapphism—that is, omit Bowen’s relationships with women—and threatened to withdraw all permissions if Glendinning did not.¹³

Historical forces also played a role in silencing aspects of Bowen’s life and writings. We have only snippets of information about her activities and reports as a spy for the British Ministry of Information (MOI), or her role as a propagandist during and after World War II, or as a cultural ambassador for the British Council in the 1950s during the Cold War. This missing dimension is the result of the violent ruptures of the Civil War in Ireland, the loss of archives during the London blitz, and the deliberate destruction of certain documents by individuals, political groups, or governments in England and Ireland. Some documents in London were “destroyed under statute,” according to Robert Fisk.¹⁴ None of Bowen’s wartime MOI reports, Fisk states, has been uncovered, as far as is known, in Ireland, since “in 1945 Irish authorities shredded 70 tons of documents considered too sensitive for scrutiny,” and in Northern Ireland, records were weeded. Even Bowen’s Court, the grand house that framed her visits to Ireland, disappeared, sold by Bowen in 1959 and razed by its new owner in 1960. Given these witting and unwitting concealments, and the disappearance of parts of her archive, she remains an elusive figure despite the fact that she is the author of 10 novels, 13 collections of short stories, and 16 works of non-fiction.

Concealment extends from her archive to her evolving modernist narrative style. John Bayley, friend and critic, credited her with the invention of new narrative conventions for concealment or not saying things in the modern novel. She preserves varying kinds of silence leaving much unsaid because of her sense of the “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Change
• 3. Terrains of the Imagination
• 4. Outsiders
• 5. Love and Lovers
• 6. Snapshots of War
• 7. Art and Intelligence
• 8. The Roving Eye
• 9. Reading Backwards
• 10. Late Life Collage
• 11. A Frightened Heart
• Back Matter