Passions in a Darkened Mirror

By Paul Gray

ELIZABETH BOWEN by Victoria Glendinning. Knopf; 332 pages; $12.50

Author Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 and died in 1973. The generous expanse of her life was even greater than the raw dates suggest. Her earliest years were spent in a social system that was virtually indistinguishable from feudalism. She was raised at Bowen's Court, the family home in County Cork, Ireland, on land that had been in Bowen possession since 1653. She spent her last years teaching in American colleges, living in rooms or rented apartments and listening to students worrying about the war in Viet Nam. At the end, her life had been touched directly by both Cromwell and Khe Sanh.

Along the way she had written ten novels, numerous short stories, essays and several travel books, winning for her work a respectful following both in Britain and the U.S. Biographer Victoria Glendinning, a British journalist who has lived in Ireland, argues passionately that Bowen is important, not only for her writings but also for her timing. Thanks to the Irish

Rising, Bowen was destined to be the last of the Anglo-Irish writers, a lively breed that included Sheridan, Swift and Oscar Wilde. Bowen also brushed against Bloomsbury during her early years as a writer. Writes Glendinning: "She is the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."

Such follow-the-dots criticism invites rude noises. Glendinning is on safer ground when she ignores her own theories and simply tells the story of Elizabeth Bowen's life. It is a fascinating tale. Elizabeth's parents were perfectly matched in their weaknesses: dreamy, high-strung people for whom life proved to be too much. Her father had a nervous breakdown in 1905, and her mother died in 1912. Faced with all this, Elizabeth developed a strategy of "not noticing" and emerged into gawky adolescence with big hands, big feet, a stammer and pronounced nearsightedness. She married Alan Cameron, a World War I veteran and civil servant, and settled into a union that was long on affection and short on passion. "I and my friends," she wrote in 1935, "all intended to marry early, partly because this appeared an achievement or way of making one's mark, also from a feeling it would be difficult to settle to anything else until this was done."

What Elizabeth settled after marriage was her career as a writer. She began writing short stories and, in remarkable time, had secured an influential patron (Rose Macaulay), an agent and some small renown. London literary life in the 1920s was both glittering and, with the right connections, easy to crack. "Inconceivably," Bowen wrote later, "I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley . . ."

With hardly a falter, Elizabeth transformed herself from acolyte into doyenne. Neither rich nor silly enough to qualify as one of Evelyn Waugh's bright young things, she became a hostess whom congenital partygoers tried to please. When she inherited Bowen's Court, friends and supplicants trooped obediently to Ireland, where they endured without electricity or bathrooms. Elizabeth admitted that "the upstairs rooms are still rather Chas. Addams-ish--I often remind myself of his hostess showing in a guest: 'This is your room . . . If you want anything, just scream." She outlived her house. It was sold and then demolished by the new owner.

Her books have outlasted other possessions. The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are the novels for which she was best known, but Glendinning offers useful glosses on others as well. With varying success, Bowen constantly attacked a single problem: the effect of innocence on a world that was not ready to cope with it. "There is no doubt," she wrote in 1932, "that angels rush in before fools." She amplified this view on another occasion: "No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden." Her style was difficult and sometimes, in its defiance of syntax and even grammar, infuriating. In 1955 Punch effectively parodied the Bowen manner: "She lit the sodden stub of last night's fag and took a sip of gin and meth to cut, as she'd have put it, the phlegm." Bowen knew that her style was odd and that it limited her popular appeal. But her manner of writing faithfully reflected the intense but indirect way she looked at the world. She approvingly described one of her novels as being "on the periphery of a passion--or. the intensified reflections of several passions in a darkened mirror."

Elizabeth Bowen has its flaws. But she does not fall into the trap of equating importance with length. If dropped, her book will not break the reader's foot. Ultimately, the biography does what it is supposed to do: it rekindles interest in the writer and in her works.

Elizabeth did not suffer fools of the pretentious kind gladly, if at all; but it was not only 'interesting people' in whom she was interested. Nice bores, and the oddest and most unlikely people, received her sympathetic and undivided attention. Nevertheless, in Oxford she did begin to meet 'interesting people' in large numbers for the first time. And the Oxford generation with which her arrival coincided was by any standards an extraordinary one. Through David Cecil, she met Maurice Bowra, who, then in his mid-twenties--he was a year older than Elizabeth--was fellow and lecturer in classics at Wadham. (He became Warden in 1938). Bowra was already a celebrated talent-spotter and host; among those who were just finishing their undergraduate careers in the mid-1920s, and who came and went within his circle, were Rex Warner, Cecil Day Lewis, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly, Kenneth Clark, Henry Yorke (Henry Green), John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Sparrow, Isaiah Berlin, AJ. Ayer . . . There were giants in the earth in those days, but if in those days they were giants it was still within the context of their own circle; just a very talented group of young men.

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