In The Last September (1929) Elizabeth Bowen is very pointed and illuminating on the efforts of upper-class ladies to turn a blind eye to bloodshed and disruption, to act as if they were in Kensington instead of Cork; and on the obtuseness of certain English incomers - army wives in particular. but also those bewildered by the complex relations existing between loyalist occupants of big houses and their rebel neighbours. She turns, as well, an astringent eye on the banal stratagems of girls in love with love. (‘Common’ behaviour is always one of her targets.) Has she appropriated any of her own feeling for Lois, the central character in the novel, and, the author tells us, not an autobiographical figure? We can find quite a few correspondences. Lois is one of those heroines who are far too edgy and complicated ever to be vulgarly infatuated. Her association with Gerald Lesworth, a young British officer attached to a nearby garrison, is rather tenuous and fraught with obstacles, on Lois’s side at least. He - the constant, steadfast soldier figure - is surer about his feelings.

Elizabeth, at roughly the same age, found herself ‘in love’ [47] with a young lieutenant garrisoned in Ireland; an engagement of sorts followed, to which a stop was put after Aunt Edie (wife of Florence’s brother George Colley) - then on holiday in Italy, where Elizabeth joined her - had had her say about the matter. It’s the sort of drama all romantically-minded girls precipitate. In the book, it is Lady Naylor, of the house called Danielstown, who intervenes in the tiresome business between moneyless Lesworth and her niece Lois, before it gets out of hand. Lady Naylor is the type of managing relative whose function is to quash any improvident alliance proposed by a member of her family. In this case, it isn’t especially difficult: she has only to enunciate the word ‘nonsense’, in a kind, social voice, for poor Gerald’s head to be filled with doubts. His doubts, in conjunction with Lois’s, finish the affair.

Lois, we’re given to understand, became engaged for want of anything better to do; life at Danielstown, where a kind of aimlessness and malaise are in the air, doesn’t meet her substantial requirements. EnvIsaging herself as Gerald’s wife is one way to imagine a livelier future. Is there, perhaps, in the final confrontation between the would-be lovers, a shade too much fuss and whipped-up desperation? ‘“Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there ...”. “I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony.’ That sort of thing. If so, it’s a very small flaw In a novel that positively hums with self-possession and perceptiveness.

The bois dormant is a recurring Bowen image (once actually attached to the ‘big house’ and its surrounding demesne), and it suits the romantic mood of The Last September . ‘In those days,’ we read on the opening page, [48] ‘girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through with a view to appearance, appeared over their shoulders.’ The novel is also concerned with disenchantment: there are things that everyone in the book has got to wake up to. You get people who go through life ineffectually; wrong commitments are entered into; being decent doesn’t save you from disaster. Your fellow countrymen may turn on you.

What gives the Lois-Gerald relationship its special edge, of course, is the atmosphere of political tension in which it’s located. Gerald, at any moment, may go to meet his death as he does, in fact, after that keyed-up talk with Lois, with her aunt’s discouraging comments ringing in his ears (‘at her age, with her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone ... She cares for her drawing intensely’). By April 1919 Cork was one of the Irish counties under military control, and police and army barracks, and British patrols, were constant objects of attack. There’s a real-life precedent for what happens to Gerald: in September 1919, at Fermoy (a town not far from Bowen’s Court), a British soldier on patrol was shot and killed by Cork No. 2 Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. Violence upon the roads. (In reprisal, British Regulars overran and ransacked Fermoy: but that doesn’t come into the Bowen story.)

Nineteen hundred and nineteen: the year Yeats singled out in his great meditation on destructiveness, loss and the creative instinct. ‘Many ingenious lovely things are gone’ [“Meditation in Times of Civil War / Ancestral Houses”, in The Tower] and more were to go, ancestral homes among them; a drunken soldiery was on the loose; and for the wagers of [49] guerrilla warfare, a striking image is found: they ‘are but weasels fighting in a hole’. Irish disorder has reached a pretty virulent pitch. The Last September is dated precisely to the following year, 1920. The British forces have gained a rowdy adjunct, dubbed the Black and Tans; at one point in the book, Lois, driving in a pony-and-trap, is obliged to turn hastily up a boreen to avoid a lorry full of these rogue irregulars. In what other ways do the troubles not quite impinge on her? A man in a trench coat, intent on Ireland’s business, hurries by her one evening in her own demesne; a cache of guns may be buried in the lower plantation; an unnerving encounter with a gunman takes place in a derelict mill round the bend of a valley (Inside the mill door, a high surge of nettles; one beam had rotted and come down, there was some debris of the roof’).

Danielstown is Bowen’s Court, unaltered; Lois, though, is a niece of the house, not child of it as Elizabeth was. (Did she have in mind, in creating Lois, that Georgian Miss Pretty who lived with her uncle and aunt at Bowen’s Court, and made the hyacinth garden that lasted down to Elizabeth’s day?) In her preface to the 1952 Knopf edition of The Last September, Elizabeth mentions her heroine’s uninflarned attitude to Ireland’s wrongs: wouldn’t Lois - ‘at her romantic age’ - have felt the lure of revolutionary beliefs? The answer is that the war, for those who grew up in the 191418 period, satisfied any reasonable juvenile craving for upheaval: enough was enough. But the truth is probably that Elizabeth’s temperament, and, by extension, Lois’s, made her place her faith in inherited assets like houses and traditions of hospitality and a ceremonious approach to [50] living. (Not contributing to anarchy’, as she said in a letter to Graharn Greene, is an important part of the writer’s function.) She thought that. however dubiously her ancestors and others had obtained their Irish holdings, they’d sufficiently enriched the life of the country to mitigate that initial injustice.

Hospitality: in The Last September’s final conflagration, ‘the door stood hospitably open upon a furnace’. Many houses of the Anglo-Irish went up in flames as a destructive urge took hold of the republican movement. Elizabeth, in Italy in the spring of 1921, recuperating from her broken engagement, received from her father a letter instructing her to brace herself. three houses in the neighbourhood had already gone. Bowen’s Court was spared, as it happened (in spite of its containing, among its collection, portraits of two of the villains of Irish history, Oliver Cromwell and William III), but its end was anticipated so intensely by Elizabeth that she must have written the ending of The Last September as a kind of exorcism.

In the book, there is some talk of sending Lois to a school of art, even though she’s not particularly talented (I think you’re cleverer than you can draw, you know,’ says a young woman visitor to Danielstown). To denote a way of marking time, the school of art isn’t arbitrarily chosen. Elizabeth, who was better than average but probably not much, once spent two terms at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row in London. Art and poetry were two things she tried her hand at before relinquishing them in favour of prose. Did the first two smack too much of uncontrollable self-expression? ‘I am dead against art’s being self-expression’, [51] she wrote in 1959. Any story worth its salt should ‘detach itself from the author’, something she was afraid her own didn’t always do. But the best of them did.

[…]

‘Places are so exciting,’ Elizabeth wrote to Virginia Woolf, ‘the only proper experiences one has. I believe I may only write novels for the pleasure of saying where people are.’

We find her making a similar assertion nearly forty years later, in Pictures and Conversations: ‘Am I not,’ she asks, ‘manifestly a writer for whom places loom large?’ What has prompted the question is the failure, as she sees it, of reviewers and commentators on Elizabeth Bowen to pay proper attention to this important aspect of her literary Impulse. Topography, for her, is ‘what gives fiction its verisimilitude’. ‘Nothing can happen nowhere.’ Bowen terrain [72] - her term - shifts about between Co. Cork London. Oxford and Kent, with occasional sallies abroad. All of locales are transfigured by her heady, acute and compelling erception of them.

As far as her stories are concerned, her electrifying use of atmosphere begins to be apparent in the 1941 volume, Look at All Those Roses, before receiving its fullest expression in the famous wartime stories collected under the title of The Demon Lover (1945). The stories’ concern with the effects of places on characters, and the relegating of characters to the places they deserve are well noted by Hermione Lee in her valuable study of Elizabeth Bowen’s work (published in 1981). Places, indeed, may have a moral implication imposed on them hence all the new dispiriting houses in the stories, the flawed or vulnerable old family homes, the gimcrack, the bogus and the adulterated. Elizabeth Bowen, after her 1920s frivolity and smartness, quickly latched on to the troubling, ddracind spirit of the next decade, and embodied it most distinctively in the story called “The Disinherited”, from The Cat Jumps (1934). There’s an air of late-night, provincial jadedness about this story, in which a corrupt poor relation ‘sells her kisses’ to her aunt’s bleak chauffeur. [...]’

Victoria Glendinning quotes an observation of Elizabeth’s which seems characteristic: ‘One wants to say,’ she remarked, apropos men and their ways, ‘break my heart if you must, but don’t wase my time.’ No one can say that her brush with Goronwy Rees was a waste of time: he turns up in The Death of the Heart, in the character of Eddie, who ‘has to get off with people because he can’t get on with them’. Goronwy Rees, we’re to understand, was first charmed with the portrait, then took another look and became enraged; he thought of starting legal proceedings, but [83] allowed himself to be disuaded (notably by E. M. Forster, Victoria Glendenning says.)

Eddie, in the novel, is taken up by Anna Quayne, an urbane woman in her mid-thirties who inhabits a house overlooking the lake at Regent’s Park, has no children, a husband who sometimes resents the demands on his wife’s time made by others (notably callers who hang their hats in the hall) and the present custody of his half-sister, product of an irregular and ludicrous union, now an orphan. Portia, her name is. Portia. is sixteen and pure in heart. She’s the quintessential Bowen innocent, for whom the ways of the world are painful and baffling. She isn’t one for making adjustments in her scheme of values in order to get by.

Anna cannot take Portia to her somewhat vitiated heart. ‘Either this girl or I are mad,’ she declares to her writer friend St Quentin Miller (annoyance having sent her grammar haywire), in the famous opening scene of the book, with its view of frosty Regency terraces looming in the January dusk. There the two stand, on a frozen footbridge, well wrapped in cloth and fur, considering Portia’s oddness - though St Quentin is really more concerned about his tea. What has happened? A diary kept by Portia has come into Anna’s hands; and Anna is dismayed by its ingenuous appraisal of her actions. ‘So I am with them, in London,’ it starts; and continues trustfully.

Portia’s trustfulness - she would even have trusted Anna not to read the diary - causes more than one character to convict her of utter lunacy. The story goes on: Portia meets Eddle, ‘brilliant child of an obscure home’, who has to play-act to advance himself (Anna, entertained by his antics, [84] has got him a position with her husband’s advertising firm, for which favour he isn’t suitably grateful: there’s a prickly side to Eddie, and his capriciousness may turn sour at any moment). ‘He was like a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang.’ (The one thing dreaded by Elizabeth at childhood parties, we remember, was pulling crackers.) Portia falls in love with Eddie, who, in turn, sees in her the fullest reflection of his own all but reliquished innocence. She lends him her diary to read.

In the middle section of the novel, Portia is packed off to Seale-on-Sea, on the Kentish coast, to stay with Anna’s old governess Mrs Heccomb, and her off-hand stepchildren, at a villa named Waikiki. (The seaside villas that enchanted the eight-year-old, we may note, have become a fit subject for satirical treatment.) Portia, to whom it occurs to invite her perfect Eddie to join her for a day or two - having received permission from her hostess to do so - is a bit of an odd fish among the jolly boys and girls of Seale-on-Sea, with their dances and gramophone records and lipsticks and outings along the beach. Eddle duly arrives and ingratiates himself with everyone, and especially with Daphne Heccomb, breezy daughter of Waikiki. We are next asked to consider poor Portia’s distress and bewilderment, in a cinema, on observing that Eddie’s right hand, which is holding hers, seems not to know what his left is up to. It is, in fact, entwined with the hand of Daphne Heccomb, who is seated on that side of him.

Portia cannot get things straight after this betrayal; Daphne, asked by Portia for an explanation, rounds on her with the news that she is insane. Eddie, similarly challenged, [85] can only warn her against himself, explaining that he simply isn’t available for the kind of exclusive and whole-hearted relationship she has in mind. Portia returns to Regent’s Park. Then there is the business of the diary. Who has spoken about it to whom? St Quentin Miller, meeting portia in teh street, breask it ot her that her innermost thoughts aren’t unknown to Anna. Did Eddie ...? Eddie, when asked, says as a matter of fact it was Anna who mentioned Portia’s diary to him, beofre Portia had so charmingly handed it to him for light reading. Portia, feeling laughed at behind her back, rns of to a fellow-sufferer - an old buffer called Major Brutt, who thinks of himself as a family friend of the Quaynes, but at whom they raise their eyebrows and poke mild fun. The distraught girl proceeeds ton enlighten the Major about the two-faced behaviour of his valued friends; not, we may be sure, out of anything akin to mailce, but simply to make it clear th to him - her last hope that he and she are in the same boat. Why, in fact, should he not marry her? The next thing is a telephone call to 2, Windsor Terrace from the put-upon Major, demanding to be told how to handle this nuisance. The Quaynes are nonplussed for a minute or two, and then a simple solution strikes them: matchett, Portia’s ally, the only family servant who has no illusions about any of them, should be dispatched in a taxi to fetch the foolish girl. This is done.

As far as Elizabeth has put herself into the book at all and there’s always a danger of inferring too much from the real-life trappings, the house by the lake, the frequent callers, the childless marriage, etc. - she is split between Anna and Portia, and consequently unindulgent to both, which makes for vigour and astringency in the narrative. Though Portia [86] may stand for candour, integrity and so forth, which can’t but appeal to the right-minded, it is shown that the effect of such qualities is simply to get their possessor into various scrapes, which anyone with an ounce of knowingness might have avoided. (She is also, Elizabeth said, the archetypal unworldly girl who comes with her belongings in one pathetic trunk to stay with grand relations: somewhat in the position of the child Jane Eyre.) It is possible that the genesis of the book was in the author’s own hurt feelings over the Goronwy Rees business (and she’s reduced that episode to a marvellously trivial betrayal, a hand held heartlessly in a cinema), but if so, these feelings have been mocked, magnified and otherwise tampered with to the point of becoming irrelevant to the plan of the novel. Only the character of Eddie, as we have seen, remained sufficiently recognizable to annoy its prototype. (May Sarton [a novelist] has left a memorable picture of Alan Cameron, walking up and down the drawingroom at Clarence Terrace with a glass in his hand, reciting the first page of The Death of the Heart , and breaking off to shout, ‘That’s genius!’) [Craig has earlier noted that Windsor Terrace, in the novel is Clarence Terrace to the life.]

‘England at war claimed Elizabeth’s allegiance absolutely, but she never, for a moment, ceased to think of herself as Irish. No amount of flitting about between England, Ireland and the Continent could dilute her sense of nationality - [96] ‘highly disturbing emotion’, she called it in an interview published in The Bell in 1942; and added, ‘It’s not - I must emphasize - sentimentality.’ Indeed: we know how she was affected by anything claggy. What she felt for Ireland was too pungent, on the one hand, and too disabused, on the other, to admit of any suspect strain. As for her position in the country - well, it has often been said that the fate of the Anglo-Arish is to be deemed Irish in England, and English in Ireland, the second sometimes carrying that slight inflection of hostility and irony that Elizabeth noted in the tone of ‘big’, as in the phrase ‘big house’, when uttered by a native. Of course, the equivocal always rivets the attention - we remember Browning’s lines: ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things, / The honest thief, the tender murderer / The superstitious atheist ...’ (lines which Graham Greene has claimed could stand as epigraphs to all his books) and we might add, the English Irishwoman. Ambivalence was certainly a productive factor in the novelist’s constitution. But in the conditions prevailing in Dublin in 1940, it was predominantly a cause of aggravation.

‘The childishness and obtuseness of this country [Ireland] cannot fail to be irritating to the English mind,’ Elizabeth announced in one of her undercover reports to Lord Cranborne at the Ministry of Information. The enormity of the current situation, she felt, ought to have prompted the Irish nation to jettison its long-standing grievances; however, ‘there seems ... only one basis on which Eire would consider treating for the ports. That is, on some suggestion from the British side that the Partition question was at least likely to be reconsidered …’ Support for Britain, and sympathy [97] for the British cause, was a fluctuating ethic in neutral Ireland: one minute in the ascendant, the next on the wane. It was apt to evaporate at any suggestion that Britain might try to requisition the ports. Eire, Elizabeth said, had invested its self-respect in its neutrality. The republic was making a stand, and meant to stick by it. It was also unwilling to expose itself to the threat of German bombing. Elizabeth didn’t have very much sympathy with this attitude, which smacked to her of the unheroic; but neither did she admit the charge of ‘disloyalty’ when it was levelled against the Irish: ‘given the plain facts of history’, she says, the word simply isn’t applicable. ‘I could wish that the English kept history in mind more, that the Irish kept it in mind less.’

All the above information, and a good deal more, was gleaned by Elizabeth in the course of conversations she conducted in Dublin. She had taken a two-room flat overlooking Stephen’s Green, when she arrived in Ireland in the summer of 1940, for the purpose of her ‘activities’. From this base she went out to parties, some of them not very exhilarating, looked up old friends, who gave her tea or sherry, and noticed a decrease in realism of outlook, engendered by the wish to steer clear of the war. ‘In Dublin 1 get engaged in deep, rather futile talks; it is hard to remember the drift afterwards, though I remember the words. I suppose that (smoke-screen use of words) is a trick of the Irish mind,’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf. ‘They are very religious. It is the political people I see mostly: it seems a craggy, dangerous, miniature world.’ That was all she felt able to say about it in a letter; but she would like to talk, ‘very much’. [98]

She also noticed in Dublin that year a new enthusiasm for the Irish language and Irish culture, which struck her as being something of a declaration of distinctiveness, a separation from England and her concerns. She saw people got up in Irish national dress in the Dublin streets, and noted, ‘Even the Irish Times now prints part of itself in Irish. It was a development that left her cold.

A travel permit issued by the Ministry of Information enabled her to come and go between the too countries […]. (p.99.)

[...] Elizabeth picked up an impression of Catholic self-righteoousness in Ireland’s attitude to the war, which was held to be a judgement on England for her atheism and [101] materialism. Anything that smacked of Communist Russia, even the word ‘revolutionary’, as in ‘We younger people in Britain are fighting this as a revolutionary war,’ was not apt to go down too well in Catholic circles. (One would have thought that the Irish connotations of the word were strong enough to blot out others.) The Irish were inclined to credit themselves with a spiritual approach to living, and to see their escape from the worldwide conflict as an outcome of this trait. (p.102.)