LITERATURE: PATRICIA CRAIGreviews Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish WritingsEdited by Éibhear Walshe Cork University Press, 259pp. £35
‘IF YOU BEGIN in Ireland,” Elizabeth Bowen famously said, “Ireland remains the norm.” And so it was for her, though not without many equivocations and reservations. As a candidate for the top place in her literary imagination, Ireland had to fight it out with the Kentish coastal towns where Bowen lived with her mother during the five years preceding Florence Bowen’s death, in 1912, and to which she returned in old age. (Neither was London excluded from the picture.) Ireland won, I think, but only just, and owed its preeminence to her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, in Co Cork. Her Ireland was not at all akin to most people’s – which is not to deny it its own validity and enchantment. Ascendancy Ireland, “big house” Ireland, is quintessential Bowen terrain. And in both her fiction and nonfiction she approaches the topic of its relation to other versions of Ireland, and to all the upheavals, social and otherwise, of the 20th century, with wit, aplomb and an uncanny perceptiveness that engenders an effect at once haunting and sardonic.
In her art, as in her life, the ambivalence and complexity noted by almost all Bowen critics are the source of a singular resonance. Her stories set in Ireland, says Éibhear Walshe in his introduction to this new nonfiction collection, enable Bowen’s literary impulse to appear at its “most illuminatingly ambivalent”. (That’s an ambivalent statement in itself.) But even her more straightforward or clear-cut reviews and essays can accommodate a measure of ambiguity in their assertions, as one thing shades into another: “The Irish face expresses fatalism brightening to animation, eagerness shading into mistrust.” This from an essay written in 1950, highlighting illusions and contradictions inherent in the Irish character.
This new selected Irish writings is a welcome addition to Bowen publications. Even if a lot of its inclusions are available elsewhere – in Hermione Lee's The Mulberry Treeof 1986, for instance, or Elizabeth Bowen's own Collected Impressionsand Afterthought– it has a value in restoring a due emphasis to the novelist's birthplace, and to her sense of herself as an Irish, or Anglo-Irish, woman. It contains criticism, reviews, prefaces, social comment and reports for the Ministry of Information in London on the mood in Dublin vis-à-vis the war and controversial Irish neutrality – the last a workmanlike undertaking far removed from any literary purpose, and it shows.
To get at the essence of the country – the “small vivid country”, Bowen calls it – it is better to read one of the pungent and lyrical appraisals of changes and continuities in Irish life. These essays remind us powerfully of how Ireland was in the past, and how it was viewed. They are notes from another age, and gain in sharpness from Bowen’s insider-outsider perspective. “The air breathed in is soporific; the distances hold other-worldly gleam . . . Speech, and speech with a bias, is the nation’s delight. Loud, lordly talkers cluster in pubs, congregate in villages after Mass, mill through horses, pigs or cattle upon a fair day.”
She is writing at a time – 1950 – before Ireland's innumerable sleepy towns woke up and, after the manner of fractious children, set about smashing all around them: architecture, traditions, tranquillity. The growth of vulgarity, which did impinge on the observer – farmers' daughters going to Mass or to town "in crenellated veil-hung hats", rich manufacturers copying the Tatlerphotographs, "enlarging the check of the tweeds by half again" – is only very mildly deprecated in these pages.
Indeed, you can tax Elizabeth Bowen with being un-Irish only in one respect: a certain determination, bred of courtesy, to offend no one and abstain from outrage. Sometimes she bends over backwards not to frame her comments in a style de haut en bas – most noticeably, perhaps, in her tribute to an old Bowen’s Court servant (“The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met“) called Sarah Barry. She doesn’t baulk at taking afternoon tea with the egregious Archbishop McQuaid (as recounted in a wartime Report) – an intriguing occasion, one feels, with both of them, moderate Protestant and rampant cleric, on their best behaviour, and topics of conversation ranging from “mystical visions” to the need to teach Irishwomen how to cook.
The current collection includes a wonderfully evocative account of Christmas at Bowen’s Court in prewar days – “The decoration, with holly and other foliage, of the pale blue inside of our Protestant church occupied the morning . . . the crux, towards the end of the day, is the installation by me of the Christmas candle – of scarlet, jade green, yellow or pink wax” – and then, towards the end of the book, comes the extinction of the great house and the last of the Bowens’ refusal to mourn (or mourn overtly): “It was a clean end. Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin.” Again, she withholds condemnation – but an “Afterward, 1963”, prepared for a new edition of her family history, tells the sorry story.
Éibhear Walshe provides a cogent and informative introduction to this new selection, and ends by acknowledging its subject’s “hyphenated identity”. I wish he would stop calling Bowen’s novels and stories her “fictive writings”, but this is only a small irritation, like Bowen’s own constant allusions to “Eire” – Eire this and Eire that – which only sounds right if you’re speaking Irish. It’s a relief when she reverts to “Ireland” or “the Irish Republic”.
And then it is odd to find so many pages devoted to the Paris Peace Conference of 1946 in a book purporting to stick to Ireland. The real virtue of the book, though, is to remind us how magnificently Elizabeth Bowen rose to every occasion: applauding and illuminating Sheridan Le Fanu, writing a poetic historical drama centred on Kinsale, presiding over the social life of Bowen’s Court. Through it all shines her distinctive critical manner, at once grand, colloquial and engagingly idiosyncratic.
Patricia Craig has written a short biography of Elizabeth Bowen in the Penguin "Lives of Modern Women" series. Her most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble
