by Lara Feigel
Sean increased Elizabeth’s political range, enlisting her sympathy for the Republican rebels. As far as he was concerned, The Last September was extremely successful as a portrait of dreamy girlhood and countryside. He had no hesitation in judging it Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘loveliest novel’, and later misremembered this as the novel that had caused him to fall in love in advance of meeting her. In fact, when he first courted her, he had no idea that she had written an Irish novel, and he read it in April 1937, just before going to stay with her at Bowen’s Court. Finishing it at breakfast (‘an unfair test’), he wrote her an ecstatic letter of congratulation, commending it as ‘entirely Irish – if that matters a damn’ (and for Sean O’Faolain, of course, it did). He could smell the hay; he adored the ‘un-underlined atmosphere’; but he was longing for ‘the “enemy” to come into the foreground a bit’. Sean, who was happy to identify with the romantic, dangerous figure in the trench coat, wanted Peter Connor to come upon Lois in the dark shrubbery. He later characterised Elizabeth Bowen’s standard plot as the encounter between ‘the kid and the cad’. Now, asking her if ‘the wall between Danielstown and Peter Connor’s farm’ could be scaled, he was prepared to be the cad for the coltish girl he persistently regarded Elizabeth herself to be.
Sean swaggered into Elizabeth’s life with all the charismatic eloquence of his hero, Daniel O’Connell, whose biography he was then writing, and insisted that she look the rebel straight in the eye. The encounter was exhilarating, painful and enlightening. Together, Sean and Elizabeth could chip away at the wall between the Big House and the Republican’s farm, and Elizabeth could find a way to engage authentically with the other side of the struggle, interrogating the credentials of her Anglo-Irish ancestors. The result was Bowen’s Court, a book that would be published in the middle of the war in 1942, but which she was already researching in 1938 and writing, in Sean’s presence, in the summer of 1939. Sean himself is perhaps most romantically acknowledged here in her portrait of Daniel O’Connell, whose ‘eloquence was to rush through remote and downtrodden Ireland like an incoming tide, filling dead reaches, lifting the people, carrying them’.
Bowen’s Court is the history of Elizabeth Bowen’s own house, set in the context of five hundred years of Irish history. It is both an attack on an imperialist power and a defence of a dying way of life. Bowen is clear in apportioning blame to the English for most of the bloodier aspects of Irish history. In the seventeenth century, ‘the chivalric element disappeared from the struggle’ between the English and the Irish. ‘The complete subjugation and the exploitation of Ireland became the object of the English burgess class.’ The Union of 1800 which brought together British and Irish church and state was, she states unequivocally, ‘a bad deal’; ‘a tragedy that puts uninformed comment quite out of countenance’.
But Bowen is equally clear in maintaining that the Anglo-Irish should not be taken for English and blamed accordingly. For the Union to take place, prominent Anglo-Irish ‘were bought, to their lasting dishonour, by peerages, by advancements in the peerage, and by sums down’. They were attracted, masochistically, by the English, but Bowen insists that this attraction was ‘too unwilling to be love’. And the Bowens themselves, for all their faults, had an ethic of ‘politeness to England, rather than loyalty’. They lived on good terms with their Irish neighbours and, although it would be presumptuous to say that they were popular, their hardnesses were pardoned and their vagaries suffered. She never heard (‘why should I?’) any remark about ‘the Irish’ prompted either by panic or by the wish to insult. The Anglo-Irish may not have done much but, for centuries, ‘we did believe we did something: we lived well, we circulated our money, we, consciously or unconsciously, set out to give life an ideal mould’.
Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with Sean O’Faolain was curtailed by war. From the start, it was evident to her that if and when war broke out between Britain and Germany, her place would be with her husband in London. During the Munich crisis in September 1938, Alan summoned Elizabeth to Clarence Terrace on what turned out to be a false alarm. On 30 September, she reported to Isaiah Berlin that Alan had telephoned her two days earlier, suggesting that she should cross that night to cope with aspects of the National Emergency in London. Crisis had been followed by anticlimax; she had done nothing but eat figs, read the ARP handbook and try on her gas mask. Feeling that more time in Ireland was owing, she arranged to return to collect some belongings and see friends in Dublin; she was not ready to leave Sean. Thankfully, the crisis was averted, and over the course of the next year Elizabeth spent much of her time in Ireland, meeting Sean fairly frequently in Cork and Dublin. He also visited her in London. In January 1939, Elizabeth wrote to ask Virginia Woolf if she had time to see a friend of hers from Ireland, who ‘wants to meet you so very much’. Virginia wrote back offering tea to Elizabeth and ‘the man with the Irish name’ (‘I’ve never read him, but am sure he’s nice’). Later Sean recollected the sight of the profiles of the two women – ‘Virginia’s exquisitely, delicately beautiful, Elizabeth’s not beautiful but handsome and stately’ – bent over a ring-casket Virginia Woolf had inherited from Ottoline Morrell.
Sean’s final visit to Elizabeth’s house in Clarence Terrace took place on 31 August 1939, the day before Germany invaded Poland. In his autobiography, Sean O’Faolain recalled how, as they ‘lay-abed, passion-sated’, Alan rang from the office to tell Elizabeth that the British fleet had been ordered to mobilise, ‘which means war’. Elizabeth thanked her husband unemotionally; awkwardly, Sean made a joke; Elizabeth replied, dryly unforgiving, that this sort of tasteless humour ‘is the sort of thing that war “does to people”, isn’t it’. In a 1940 account of a journey around Ireland made during this period Sean O’Faolain rewrote the event altogether, claiming more heroically that he was in fact at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain in Mayo, a traditional site of Irish pilgrimage, on the day that war was declared.
In October 1939, Sean made one final visit to Bowen’s Court, where he found Elizabeth trying to haul the house into the twentieth century – getting a telephone put in, and having the house wired for electricity. It was clear that this was the end of the relationship; Elizabeth was about to decamp more permanently to London. After casting herself in the enjoyable role of the feisty cailín of a Republican gunman she was ready to identify herself as the loyal wife of an English civil servant. To an extent, Sean envied Elizabeth her role in the war. While staying at Bowen’s Court, he wrote an article entitled ‘Irish Blackout’ for the Manchester Guardian, where he described the anxious atmosphere in the Irish countryside: ‘Tradition has been broken. The heart is dishevelled. Continuity has been blotted out.’ He was deafened by the ‘silence from across Europe’, blinded by the ‘total darkness of the mind’. ‘We sit wondering what it must be like in London, Berlin, Warsaw, conjuring furnace towns, flying men, and complaining beasts.’ A year later, Elizabeth Bowen would write in her short story ‘Summer Night’ that ‘in the heart of the neutral Irishman indirect suffering pulled like a crooked knife’.
The affair was officially over. However, Bowen listed O’Faolain among five other friends and relatives she had met in Dublin in her first report to the British government in July 1940. It is possible that it was more than a cursory meeting; that her letter to Woolf was disingenuous and her decision to visit wartime Ireland was the result of more than just a sense of political duty. Either way, she remained sufficiently in touch with O’Faolain for him to publish an article by her on ‘The Big House’ in the first issue of The Bell, Ireland’s new literary magazine, which he edited throughout the war.
This article of October 1940 comes out of the writing of Bowen’s Court and reveals Bowen thinking urgently about the role of the Big House in contemporary Ireland. In his letter about The Last September O’Faolain told Bowen that she should write about a Danielstown Big House ‘that was at least aware of the Ireland outside’; ‘that, perhaps, regretted the division enough to admit it was there’. Bowen’s
article is an attempt to explain the Big House to those on the outside of its walls; to protest that it is not as isolated as it seems (‘one’s own point of departure always seems to one normal’) and to elucidate its appeal – the ‘peculiar spell’ cast by the dead who lived there and pursued the same routine within the house and now provide ‘a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and every hour’.
Rather than defending the privilege of the inhabitants, Bowen assumes that everyone now knows ‘that life is not all jam in the big house’. Expensive sacrifices must be made and ‘new democratic Ireland no longer denounces the big house, but seems to marvel at it. Why fight to maintain life in a draughty barrack?’ From amid the bombs in London, Bowen asks herself the same question. Can the Big House justify its existence and the sacrifices that must be made on its behalf in a time of war? The answer is that it can; that the social discipline – the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal – is now more relevant than ever. And, even with the bolts and chains that O’Faolain saw as preparing the way for a siege, the Big House is not designed to exclude but to bring together. The big rooms demand that we ‘scrap the past, with its bitternesses and barriers, and all meet, throwing in what we have’; the doors, which stand open all day and are only regretfully barred up at night, welcome the stranger, just as much as the friend.
In Ireland in November 1940, a month after he had published her article, Sean took Elizabeth out for a final lunch. They went to Jammet’s, Dublin’s best restaurant. Before the war, Virginia Woolf had visited Dublin and despaired at the impossibility of cultural revolution ‘when the best restaurant in the capital is Jammet’s, when there’s only boiled potatoes in the biggest hotel in Dublin’. Now, the food at Jammet’s seemed positively opulent in contrast with the wartime rationing that had affected even London’s grandest establishments. Elizabeth later recalled how during the war British journalists, happy to arrive in Dublin, headed on arrival straight to Ireland’s finest restaurants, first to eat, then to type ‘gargantuan stories of Irish eating’ for the papers represented.
Yet this was not, according to Sean, ‘a happy lunch’:
She did not say why she was revisiting our well-fed and neutral Dublin from her bombed and Spartan London, and I did not ask lest I should touch the nerve of some private crisis at Bowen’s Court, and a lunch is a lunch even if between foiled lovers. As it was I blundered almost with my first words, saying with a gush of false gaiety as I shook out my table-napkin, ‘Well, Elizabeth? So it is taking a world war to divorce us?’
Uttering these ‘insensitive words’, Sean remembered his blunder of the previous August; Elizabeth gave him the same reply – this was the sort of thing that war ‘does to people’. ‘Presently,’ Sean O’Faolain later reflected, ‘we outdid one another in fatuity.’ He said floridly, ‘I am afraid, Elizabeth, that I am content too often to let life ride me down. Whereas I always imagine you riding down life astride a powerful, prancing dappled horse.’ ‘I have never before felt so completely a leader!’ she replied.
During lunch, Sean was oblivious of the fact that Elizabeth was using him once more as material for the Ministry of Information. ‘I was able,’ she wrote in her report, ‘to see again, over tea or sherry, people whom I had met elsewhere, and to continue conversations that had promised to be interesting. Ostensibly I was in Dublin on holiday and “having a rest”.’ Again she listed O’Faolain among her contacts, and it was from his point of view that she described Dublin society as ‘suffering from claustrophobia and restlessness’. The intelligentsia was minding the suspension of travel to and from Britain and was frightened of parochialism; the resulting deliberate escapism could be dreary, though she was struck by ‘the intelligence (if not always the wisdom) and the animation of the talk’.
In his autobiography, O’Faolain claimed that a few weeks later he gathered that Dublin gossip was suggesting Bowen was there for the Ministry of Information. If this was true, then the gossip did not reach very far; James Dillon, the leader of the Opposition and the subject of several of Bowen’s interviews, later expressed complete surprise when he found out about her reports. Whether he learnt the news then or later, O’Faolain found it distressing: here was another example of what war did to people. And Sean’s Elizabeth, the romantic dreamer, may have thought that she wanted to help the war effort but would have been devastated if Ireland had abandoned her neutrality: ‘the very thought of Ireland at war would have torn Elizabeth’s heart apart’. He was right, of course: Bowen never questioned the judiciousness of neutrality as a policy. Her passionate love of Ireland, which had intensified during the relationship with O’Faolain, continued into the war and beyond. She had signed up as a spy partly to protect the interests and reputation of the country she loved. But O’Faolain underestimated the detached pragmatism with which she hoped, in her letter to Virginia Woolf, that she could ‘be some good’ in mitigating the tension between the two countries. O’Faolain would claim Bowen again and again as an Irish writer. ‘She is an Irishwoman, at least one sea apart from English traditions,’ he insisted in a 1956 account of her fiction; she knew English life only ‘as an exile with an Irish home’. He could not accept the extent of her practical investment in Britain winning the war.
For her part, Bowen was still more loyal to O’Faolain than her Ministry of Information report might suggest. While she was in Ireland, he asked her to review his new novel, Come Back to Erin, for the December issue of The Bell. The resulting piece is a generous tribute to the man she had loved. Opening with the statement that ‘Come Back to Erin is the ironic title of Mr O’Faolain’s latest, and greatest, novel’, Bowen found that the book was too large to come inside the scope of a short review: ‘To give the range of humanity, at its highest and lowest, is probably the first task of the novelist: Mr O’Faolain has done this.’ He had regained the ‘magnificent objectivity and the poetic fullness’ of A Nest of Simple Folk, which he had posted to her before his first visit to Bowen’s Court. And he had produced a tragedy devoid of cheap tricks, cynicism and sentiment. To read the book was to suffer, to an extent. But there was a tenderness, a ‘love of man in the writing that leaves a sort of sweetness about the heart’.
Elizabeth Bowen remained in Ireland until the end of January 1941. Alan joined her for Christmas and then she was alone once again, in the severe seclusion of Bowen’s Court. ‘To be here is very nice,’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf at the beginning of January,
but I no longer like, as I used to, being here alone. I can’t write letters, I can’t make plans. The house now is very cold and empty, and very beautiful in a glassy sort of way. Every night it freezes. There are some very early lambs which at night get through the wires and cry on the lawn under my windows.
Boxed in by the barren mountains, she was feeling claustrophobic with no one to talk to. And, whatever British journalists might say about the luxurious conditions in Ireland, rationing made country life difficult. There was no petrol at all, so she was completely immobilised – ‘at least immobilised until we get new ideas about time’. She had a bicycle but found it impossible to think while cycling; she would much rather have had a horse. Meanwhile, in another world and another time, the bombing in London continued, and it was almost time to return.
See notes on Chapter 6
7
‘How we shall survive this I don’t know’
Hilde Spiel, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke, autumn 1940–spring 1941
Hilde Spiel also left London in October 1940, though she was less reluctant than Elizabeth Bowen to leave the bombs behind. She and her daughter were evacuated to Oxford where they stayed with their friend Teresa Carr-Saunders and her husband, who was the director of the London School of Economics, in an old English manor house on the Isis. Peter de Mendelssohn was less liberated by his family’s departure than Greene or Yorke. He would not have been averse to a wartime affair, but he had a novel to write in the evenings, a severe lack of money, and was constrained by the conti
nued presence of Hilde’s parents. Hilde herself was pleased to escape both Wimbledon and the bombs. The countryside around the Isis was beautiful, and Oxford felt decidedly more cosmopolitan than the dreary London suburbs.
Away from London, though, Hilde grew more fearful. She no longer had to set an example of English stoicism for her hysterical mother and she became preoccupied with the more nightmarish aspects of the war. ‘This morning at 8am I dreamed that you and I left a restaurant and in the vestibule were both shot dead,’ she wrote to Peter. ‘I still remember falling down on the floor next to you and saying quite calmly: just kiss me goodbye in case we should die. It wasn’t really unpleasant and now I quite know what it feels like.’ Meanwhile, reading about the bombing in London, she was anxious about Peter’s safety. ‘My darling, I am horrified at the thought of what you’re going through in Wimbledon,’ she complained a few days later. ‘Sixty bombs in one night – it is incredible, dearest, will this wretched Ministry never evacuate London? . . . How we shall survive this I don’t know . . . If the Americans don’t save England it’ll be hopeless.’
Hilde now had little faith in the British ability to win the war without America. As a result, she and Peter looked into the possibility of escaping as a family, first to America and then to the Azores. But the plans proved too complicated and Peter was indecisive. On 11 October 1940 he told Hilde that he was now convinced that it was too late, and that he was relieved by this outcome. ‘The Azores would have been a perpetual nightmare to me.’ He apologised to her for ‘all the heart-searching confusion I caused you with my indecision and even damaging ideas’ but he was praying that he had done the right thing. From the beginning of the war he had hated the idea of leaving Europe. ‘If England fights, it fights not just for itself but also for us,’ he had reminded Hilde in 1938; ‘we are Europeans.’