by Lara Feigel
During this period Henry was seeing very little of his wife and son. In the phoney war he had been able sometimes to work four days and nights at a stretch and then to take forty-eight hours off, which gave him time to go back to the country to visit them. He was now too busy to be allowed to do this. Dig seems to have remained cheerful, or at least less needily lonely than Vivien Greene, in his absence. But Henry did not make the situation easier for her by sending her letters imploring ‘DON’T COME UP TO LONDON’ or playing a practical joke involving telephoning her to say that he was in a burning building and unlikely to emerge alive.
Yorke describes the predicament of wartime wives in Caught, where the men who take girls out to nightclubs have come back to London from the countryside earlier in the day, leaving their wives dragging along the station platform, ‘hanging limp to door handles’ from which they are snatched off by porters. In the published version of the novel, Richard’s wife is dead, and his son Christopher is looked after by Richard’s sister-in-law, Dy. However, this was a response to anxiety from the Hogarth Press, who thought that the censors would object to a fireman being portrayed as engaged in an adulterous affair. Initially Dy was the wife rather than the sister-in-law, and was evacuated rather than dead. This made the original version of the story in part a tribute to Dig, offering an assurance that Henry’s love was unaltered, in spite of his adultery.
In the original typescript Richard, though still self-indulgently in love with Hilly, comes to miss his wife with equivalent sentimentality. Indeed, her absence leads to ‘a new year’s turn of love’ on his part, as well as a first love for his son. On leave, visiting Dy in the countryside, Richard is overcome by sensuous longing. ‘Now that he was back in this life only for a few days, he could not keep his hands off her’; the touch of her magnolia skin is a promise ‘of the love they had one for the other, and of the love they would yet hold one another in’.
He could not leave her alone, stroked her wrists, pinched, kissed her eyes, nibbled her lips while, as for her, she smiled, joked, and took him to bed at all hours of the day with her, and lay all night murmuring to him.
These passages are a testament to Richard’s continued desire for his wife which Dig, reading it, could have taken as a sign of Henry’s own feelings. But there is an unreal quality to the writing. We might expect Richard’s feelings for Hilly to be falsely idealised, but there is an equivalent lack of everyday knowledge in his relationship with his wife that seems more odd. The kind of love that flowers between them seems to be the love of strangers; not merely rendered strange by war and absence, but strange to each other because fundamentally unknown. There are also uncomfortable revelations, such as when Dy takes off all her clothes to come naked into bed with Richard and he observes the unusualness of the act: ‘as a rule he had to beg before she would take off her nightdress.’ However this is nonetheless a scene where Yorke can evince sympathy for his wife’s predicament. Dy is visiting Richard in London, and she sobs with longing for ‘the darling flat and you’. Although Richard is bemused by her tears, and has begun the scene by wondering if his wife can smell Hilly on his skin, he does all he can to comfort her. He assures her honestly that ‘it’s everything to have you both again’ and kisses her neck, so that she lies back ‘slack’, happy in the arms of her husband.
See notes on Chapter 5
6
‘Ireland can be dementing’
Elizabeth Bowen, autumn 1940
In October 1940 Elizabeth Bowen abandoned Clarence Terrace to the nightly bombs and travelled by boat to neutral Ireland. The crossing, by train and boat, took a day, and it was then a long bus ride from Dublin to her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, in County Cork. For most of the journey the countryside undulated gently until suddenly, as the bus drew near Mitchelstown, the towering Galtees mountain range came into view in coloured peaks. Beyond Mitchelstown, Bowen entered the familiar lonely countryside surrounding Bowen’s Court, which was squared in by mountains on three sides: the Ballyhouras in the north, the Kilworth Hills in the east and the Nagles mountains in the south. This was majestic, aloof scenery and Bowen’s ‘high bare Italianate house’ always seemed both dreamier and more austere than usual on Bowen’s wartime trips to Ireland. The journey west lengthened the days, as Stella finds in The Heat of the Day, arriving at just such a house in the war. As she stands looking down the length of a large room at a fire burning in a white marble fireplace, the hour seems outside time: ‘an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire’s flutter and the clock’s ticking out there in the hall were to be heard’. In her fatigue, it feels as though it is another time, rather than another country that Stella has come to.
Bowen’s business in Ireland was both personal and official. She was visiting Bowen’s Court and catching up with old friends in Cork and Dublin. She was also reporting on the situation in Ireland for the Ministry of Information, and was renting a flat overlooking the bustling park in Dublin’s principal Georgian square, St Stephen’s Green, from which to do this. Bowen’s sense of her own Irish identity had lessened since September 1939. From the start of the war, it was clear that Ireland was going to remain neutral. The Irish Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera, leader of the nationalist Fianna Fáil party, was determined to keep Ireland out of the war for the sake of economic stability, safety (Ireland’s army was small and ill-equipped) and the symbolic importance of Ireland’s independence from Britain. It was evident that Ireland could not enter the war without reopening the civil war of 1921–2. Bowen respected the decision, but if she was pro-neutrality for Ireland then she was also pro-British. She could sympathise with the point of view of the British, who saw Ireland’s opting out of the war as cowardly, irresponsible and dangerous, given the strategic importance of the Irish ports to the British war effort and self-defence. Once England was under threat Bowen had begun to identify, loyally and romantically, with her adopted homeland, and to feel impatient with the Irish intransigence.
In the spirit of reconciliation – hoping to be an ambassador who could explain the British and the Irish to each other – Bowen had written to the Ministry of Information in the spring of 1940 offering her services as a spy. She was sent to Ireland that July, soon after the fall of France. Writing to Virginia Woolf, Bowen reported that she felt it was important to go, hoping as she did to ‘be some good’, but that she felt low at going away.
If there’s to be an invasion of Ireland, I hope it may be while I’m there – which I don’t mean frivolously – but if anything happens to England while I’m in Ireland I shall wish I’d never left, even for this short time.
In Ireland, where the war was referred to only as ‘the Emergency’, she would feel separated from the crisis.
In fact she was back in good time to witness the first bombs falling on London that September. Now, only two months into the bombing, it was sad to leave London again, but relations between Britain and Ireland were at their most volatile and Bowen hoped to ameloriate the situation. In 1938, Britain had handed over control of three Atlantic seaports at Cóbh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly to the 1922 Irish Free State, giving the Irish full control over their own defences and thus making Irish neutrality possible when the British were at war. Churchill, then an MP, was highly critical of this move and now, as Prime Minister, he was determined to use the Irish ports to defend Britain. Given that Ireland was arguably just as much at the mercy of German invasion as Britain (as demonstrated by the cases of other neutral nations such as Belgium and Holland), Churchill could not understand why de Valera refused to accept that this was in Ireland’s interests as well. The tension was exacerbated by British losses in the Battle of the Atlantic, the focus of Britain’s war efforts in the first year of the war. In the autumn of 1940, a succession of British ships were sunk by German submarines in the Irish Sea. As far as Churchill was concerned, the losses had only occurred because the British could not use the south and west coasts of Ireland to refuel their flotillas and aircraft. Determined
to pressurise the Irish, he gave official credence to popular stories that the Irish were allowing German submarines to refuel on the western coasts.
As a passionate supporter of Churchill, Bowen was increasingly impatient with Irish politics. ‘Ireland can be dementing, if one’s Irish,’ she had written to Virginia Woolf before her visit in the summer. It was all the more dementing if one had just experienced a frightening two months of bombing, and fully appreciated the strategic importance of the ports. But at the same time, Bowen could still understand the reasoning behind neutrality, and was loyally committed to explaining it to the equally intransigent English. Reporting back to London on 9 November, she described the unfavourable reaction of the Irish public to Churchill’s remarks about the Irish ports, stating that even if de Valera wanted to be amenable, public opinion would now be defiantly against compromise. She was aware that the ‘childishness and obtuseness’ of Eire could not fail to be irritating to the English mind. But she reminded those in Britain that any suggestion of a violation of Eire could be used to implement enemy propaganda and weaken the British case. The British might feel that Eire was making a fetish of her neutrality, but this assertion of her neutrality was Eire’s ‘first free self-assertion’ and she had invested her self-respect in it. In addition, ‘it would be sheer disaster for this country, in its present growing stages, and with its uncertain morals, to be involved in war’.
As far as Bowen was concerned, it was possible for Eire to retain her neutrality and still lease her ports to the British. But this, she lamented, was a notion ‘the popular mind here cannot grasp’. Any mention of involvement in the war and the public began to fear the immediate bombing of Ireland. And ‘one air raid on an Irish city would produce a chaos with which, in the long run, England would have to cope’. For her part, Bowen was attempting to create consensus by assuring the Irish that England had no wish for Ireland to enter the war. She urged the War Office to arrange for ‘a tactful broadcast, apparently to England, but at Eire’, making this clear.
Bowen’s own sympathies, as an Anglo-Irishwoman living in England, were complex. In a later interview she described the Anglo-Irish as ‘a race inside a race’ – ‘a sort of race carved out of two races’. She was Irish enough to see that war would divide and destroy her native country, but English enough to see the need to do whatever it took to defeat Germany. More than anything else, she was enough of a native to see that the English were handling the Irish in the wrong way. And Bowen had always been able to sympathise with the Irish Republicans in their impatience with the British. Her 1929 novel The Last September depicted the Troubles which engulfed Ireland a decade earlier from the point of view of an Anglo-Irish family who have almost as much sympathy with the Republican rebels who are trying to burn the Big Houses down as with the British soldiers who are attempting to protect them.
The book is set in Danielstown, a Big House modelled on Bowen’s Court. This house, loftily perched on high steps at the top of a lawn, is surrounded by a ‘screen of trees’, which press in ‘from the open and empty country like an invasion’. It is the setting for the ‘ambushes, arrests, captures and burnings, reprisals and counter-reprisals’ that, as Bowen would later write in a preface to the novel, ‘kept the country and country people distraught and tense’.
The British patrolled and hunted; the Irish planned, lay in wait, and struck.
Inside the house, the Naylors, an Anglo-Irish couple, preside over their wistful niece Lois and rebellious pro-IRA nephew Laurence, hosting tennis parties while they wait for their house to be burned down. ‘One can only say,’ Bowen goes on in the preface, ‘it appeared the best thing to do.’ But their position was not, she adds, only ambiguous; it was ‘more nearly heart-breaking than they cared to show’. Inherited loyalty to Britain pulled them one way; their own temperamental Irishness the other.
The Naylors resent the interfering presence of the British almost as much as the Irish do themselves. ‘This country,’ Sir Richard complains, ‘is altogether too full of soldiers, with nothing to do but dance and poke old women out of their beds to look for guns.’ ‘I’m not English,’ says Laurence to Gerald, an English soldier who is courting Lois, when Gerald arrives at the house and proudly announces that he has captured a local Republican revolutionary called Peter Connor. Gerald is shocked when Sir Richard declares his intention to send Peter’s mother some grapes. ‘I had no idea,’ he exclaims, perplexed, ‘these people were friends of yours.’ Meanwhile, only a few days earlier, Lois has had a secret encounter with Peter Connor, who appeared, garbed in a trench coat with ‘a resolute profile, powerful as a thought’, beside her on a dark shrubbery path in the grounds. Indeed, her unwitting meeting with Connor was charged with just the sexual possibility that is lacking from most of her assignations with Gerald. As a suitor Gerald is too careful, too prosaic – in the terms of the novel, too English – to be a satisfactory object for Lois’s unfocused longing.
Since the publication of The Last September, Bowen’s own inclination to sympathise with the Republicans had been strengthened by her two-year affair with a real-life Peter Connor figure, the Irish writer and one-time IRA gunman, Sean O’Faolain. The pair had met early in 1937, though both had already privately admired the other’s work. Editing a collection of short stories in 1936, Bowen informed William Plomer that the only ‘real pleasure’ had been O’Faolain’s Midsummer Night’s Madness collection, which she thought ‘grand’. ‘Have you met him?’ she asked Plomer, curiously; ‘Is he nice? He might possibly be quite dim.’ O’Faolain, meanwhile, had read Bowen’s Friends and Relations and ‘fallen utterly in love with this author who had Turgenev’s triple trick of presenting reality to me as close-up as if it were a ball balanced on her five finger tips’. Just when he was despairing of the future of the Irish novel, hope had arrived. Accordingly, he arranged a meeting through their mutual friend, the literary editor of the Spectator, Derek Vershoyle. O’Faolain wrote to Bowen to announce his admiration in advance. ‘I find so much trembling loveliness in your books that they have given me quite a bad time,’ he announced; ‘lonely folk shouldn’t read lovely books.’ He could only hope that she played fair and carried the aura of her imagination about her real self.
The meeting was a success; a month later O’Faolain was writing to Bowen mentioning how much he would ‘love to run down there [to Kildorrey] and see your home’, though his wife Eileen ‘could hardly come at the moment’. Would 8 May be possible? By the summer of 1937, Bowen was reporting to another former lover, Humphry House, that ‘I am, we are, someone and I are, very much in love’. ‘It doesn’t feel like a love affair,’ she added; ‘it feels like a marriage.’ She described O’Faolain as ‘the best (I think, without prejudice) of the younger Irish writers’, adding proudly that he had fought with the Irish in the Anglo-Irish war, then the Republicans in the Civil War, though he was not at all like anybody’s idea of an ex-gunman, being instead ‘a very gentle person with fair hair – or hair, at least, about the colour of mine’. Sean, like Elizabeth, was the age of the century, though they were doing very different things in the same years of their lives. Both were married and anxious not to hurt their spouses, so they were trying to pay for their happiness by ‘being very good’. All this had increased her allegiance to Ireland: ‘I feel wedded to the country, and rooted there.’
Born only a few months and a few miles apart, Elizabeth and Sean were nonetheless enemies by birth. For centuries, his Catholic, Republican ancestors had hated the Protestant landed gentry who inhabited Bowen’s Court. May Sarton later recalled how Elizabeth ‘at one time suffered from the taunts of one man she loved who was Irish; there was never, there could not be, a perfect equilibrium after centuries of such hatred on one side and condescension on the other’. For Sean’s daughter, the novelist Julia O’Faolain, who was a small child during the affair, this was sex ‘as synecdoche’: the coming together of two Irelands; the fiery liaison of the daughter of the Big House with the man who burned such houses down
. Years later Elizabeth recollected Sean watching her as she locked up Bowen’s Court for the night, heaving an iron bar into place and fastening the hall door with chains. ‘Here,’ he told her, ‘was a Big House ready for a siege!’ Simultaneously, they were stirred by complex race memories; she was aware that her own first Irish ancestor had come from Wales, while Sean was descended from the ancient inhabitants of the land.
Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O’Faolain at Bowen’s Court, c. 1938
But Elizabeth discovered a new side of Ireland through Sean. As a child in Dublin, Elizabeth had been oblivious to the Irish revival that was going on around her. For her Irish contemporaries, this was the era when W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, revived Celtic art and translated Celtic fairy stories. But Elizabeth Bowen recorded in Bowen’s Court that ‘so complete was my parents’ immunity from the Irish Revival that I only heard of this for the first time when I was at school in England, about 1916’. Since then, she had read her way through the new Irish canon and met Yeats at a dinner given by her friend Maurice Bowra. But it was through Sean that she had direct access to the movement, and was introduced to Yeats in a domestic setting. ‘I met some of the grand old boys,’ Elizabeth reported to William Plomer in 1938; ‘like Yeats, with whom I spent an evening, who was an angel, in his own house, less showy and more mellow: he has a superb white cat.’ In his autobiography, Sean O’Faolain recalled that Elizabeth made such a hit with the ageing poet that Yeats’s wife kept imploring Sean not to take her away: ‘He likes her! He likes her!’ Sean also introduced Elizabeth to his contemporaries. Frank O’Connor came to stay at Bowen’s Court where she described him chanting in the library, ‘dropping his head back as did Yeats’, recalling ‘the magnificence of the Midnight Court, poetry and bawdry of an Ireland before the potato had struck root’.