Decline of the Squireens

BOWEN'S COURT -- Elizabeth Bowen --Knopf ( $3.50 ) . Elizabeth Bowen, excruciatingly sensitive novelist, who has stalked many a ghost in the subcellars and skeleton closets of the mind (The Death of the Heart; To the North), in this book turns from fiction to ponder upon the dead bones of her ancestors. Bowen' s Court is 1) the history of the rise & fall of the Anglo-Irish gentry, as exemplified in ten generations of Bowens; 2) the story of Novelist Bowen's passionate attachment to Bowen's Court, the square, empty, echoing 18th-Century family mansion which "like Flaubert's ideal book about nothing . . . sustains itself on itself by the inner force of its style"; 3) a bloodstained tapestry of Irish history, from Cromwell's terror to the Trouble (1921).

With Cromwell to Cork. The book is also a coolly masochistic self-revelation of Novelist Bowen. "I am ruled," she says, "by a continuity I cannot see." It is a continuity of spiritual rootlessness; and by "the savage and austere light of a burning world," Author Bowen attempts to explain this rootlessness (a universal malady) in local terms of the Bowens and Ireland.

Ever since the first alien Bowen muscled his way with Cromwell into County Cork, ten generations of Bowen gentry have had a mania for land. For without land the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry had nothing. In Catholic Ireland, they were spiritual aliens, "people of the ruins."

Colonel Henry Bowen, the founder of the family fortune, was a half-crazy, atheistic, marauding Welsh adventurer who abandoned his Puritan wife to take part in Cromwell's invasion of Ireland.

When the English invaders divvied up the best Irish lands, Henry settled down on his share, a small estate in the northern part of County Cork. There he established the Bowen dynasty which for 250 years lived defensively on its ingrown clannishness. Those were years of an "intense, centripetal life . . . isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical facts of space."

The Bowens were immured by the "affair of origin"--by their separateness from the native Catholic Irish who islanded their existence. Outside Bowen's Court rolled the violent bloody history of Ireland. The Bowens looked the other way. "The structure of the great Anglo-Irish society was raised over a country in martyrdom. To enjoy prosperity" (and enjoy it most of the Bowens did) "one had to exclude feeling, or keep it within the prescribed bounds."

Aliens Entirely. But Ireland took its revenge on the alien Bowens. It was a revenge as formless and pervasive as a fog from the bogs. In their isolation the Bowens fell to fighting each other like spiders in a bottle. They fought about careers, buried treasure, inheritances, but mostly about the land. Tired of it all, Elizabeth's father deserted the land, from which the family had drawn its strength to survive. He became a city lawyer. Bowen's Court fell into disuse.

To Author Bowen this desertion of the land seems a portent that far transcends the Bowen family. For she believes that the decay of the squireens has opened the way to the rise of those clamorous, propertyless masses, who, like the gentry, have a passion for power, but, unlike the gentry, lack both the social wisdom and the social responsibilities which the land enjoins upon even the worst of those who own it.

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