To mark the inaugural Trevor/Bowen Summer School this weekend in Mitchelstown, Eibhear Walshelooks at Bowen's relationship to the north Cork landscape.
Elizabeth Bowen's imaginative tenure on the landscape of north Cork, the fields and hills around her family home, Bowen's Court, was a complex one, much to the benefit of her fiction. On the one hand, Bowen writes: "Am I not manifestly a writer for whom places loom large?
As a reader, it is to the place-element that I react most strongly; for me, what gives fiction verisimilitude is its topography." Place, the land around her home in north Cork, loomed largest in her writings at times of war and disruption, particularly during the Irish War of Independence and again during the second World War.
On the other hand, in her family history, Bowen's Court, Bowen is clear-eyed about the history of colonial injustice that imposed her family as unwelcome landlords and owners on this same landscape: "My family got their position and drew their power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong . . . England and Ireland each turned to the other a closed, harsh, distorted face, a face that, in each case, their lovers hardly knew."
Her family had been settled in Farrahy for nearly 200 years by the time of her birth in 1899, and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history between landlord and landscape: "The land outside Bowen's Court's windows left prints on my ancestors' eyes that looked out: Perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me."
Bowen herself spent every childhood summer at Bowen's Court until her father's nervous breakdown in 1907, and she later inherited the estate at her father's death in 1930, the only female Bowen to own the house. Thereafter, she and her husband, Alan Cameron, divided their lives between England and Farrahy. On her death in 1973, she was buried next to her husband and her father in the local churchyard.
Throughout her writing career, the landscape around Farrahy both haunted and energised her as a writer. Again and again, she writes of these fields, imbuing them with a hypnotic aura of haunted aloneness and intangible menace. Consider this passage from Bowen's Court: "Inside and about the house and in the demesne woods you feel transfixed by the surrounding emptiness; it gives depth to the silence, quality to the light. The land around Bowen's Court, even under its windows, has an unhumanised air the house does nothing to change. Here are, even, no natural features, view or valley to which the house may be felt to relate itself. It has set, simply, its pattern of trees and avenues on the virgin, anonymous countryside. Like Flaubert's ideal book about nothing, it sustains itself on itself by the inner force of its style."
Nowhere is Bowen's acute sense of a lone house set in a brooding landscape more starkly represented than in her 1929 novel of the Irish War of Independence, The Last September. In this novel, Bowen seems to admire her Anglo-Irish protagonists, the Naylors, for their courage in the face of imminent extinction in the hands of the emergent Irish revolutionaries. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor of Danielstown, the house at the centre of the novel, maintain the civilised modes of country life in the face of rebellion and insurrection.
At the same time, Bowen undermines the Naylors' code of civilised courage, hinting that destruction is imminent and the Anglo-Irish way of life doomed. She projects this suppressed Anglo-Irish dread of extinction on to the north Cork landscape, particularly evident in this description of Danielstown, a version of Bowen's Court, glimpsed at a distance by the young daughter of the Anglo-Irish, Lois. "To the south, below them, the demesne trees of Danielstown made a dark, formal square like a rug on the green country.
In their heart, like a dropped pin, the grey glazed roof reflecting at the wide, light, lovely, unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set, the sky lightly glinted. Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; spaces of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here too, their isolation became apparent.
The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide, light, lovely, unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set."
When Danielstown is finally burned down at the end of the novel, this attack is seen as an execution, the beleaguered Anglo-Irish house finally humanised in its death throes.
BOWEN'S OWN HOUSE survived the War of Independence but, after the death of her husband Alan Cameron in 1952, she struggled with the costs of maintaining Bowen's Court. Finally, in 1959, she sold it, and the house was subsequently demolished. In a final essay on Bowen's Court, republished in 1963, she wrote of the newly absent house in terms of its imaginative survival: "The house, having played its part, has come to an end. It will not, after all, celebrate its two hundredth birthday - of that, it has fallen short by some thirteen years. The shallow hollow of land under the mountains, on which Bowen's Court stood, is again empty. Not one hewn stone left on another on the fresh-growing grass. Green covers all traces of the foundations. Today so far as the eye can see, there might never have been a house there. One cannot say that the space is empty . . . It was a clean end. Bowen's Court never lived to be a ruin."
It is true that nobody has an imaginative monopoly on the Irish landscape, but for me at least, the fields around Farrahy and Kildorrery are indelibly Elizabeth Bowen's, always seen through the lens of her clear-eyed, haunted, haunting prose. This first Bowen/Trevor Summer School, a reclamation of two important Irish writers from within their own locale, is a welcome sign of Bowen's continued place - both in Irish writing and also in the landscape of north Cork - into the 21st century.
Dr Eibhear Walshe is speaking on Elizabeth Bowen and the Fields of North Cork today at 3pm in Farrahy Church, north Cork, as part of the Bowen/Trevor Summer School. For more information, visit www. mitchelstownliterarysummerschool.com
Essay