by Lara Feigel
10
‘Can pain and danger exist?’
Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Yorke, July–December 1942
In July 1942, Charles Ritchie accompanied Elizabeth Bowen to Ireland. The war was going badly for the British and it was a relief to escape the atmosphere of helpless apprehension in London. Since January 1942, British forces had suffered setbacks on all fronts. The public learnt of defeats in Singapore and Hong Kong in the Far East and of a particularly humiliating reversal at Tobruk in North Africa. In a speech to the House of Commons in April, Churchill acknowledged that there had been ‘a painful series of misfortunes in the Far East’ but insisted that ‘the violence, fury, skill and might of Japan’ had exceeded anything they had been led to expect. As for the Middle East, ‘by what narrow margins, chances and accidents was the balance tipped against us no one can compute’. ‘Even Hitler makes mistakes,’ he added rather plaintively in a broadcast to the world in May. Churchill’s popularity fell to a wartime low of 78 per cent in June and he faced a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons at the start of July.
In Russia, Stalin’s beleaguered forces fought on heroically against Hitler’s, while Stalin pleaded with Britain and America to open a second front in western Europe to relieve the unrelenting attack on the eastern front. Meanwhile Hitler had responded to the bombing of the old German cities of Lübeck and Rostock by retaliating with the so-called ‘Baedeker raids’ on Britain. The Nazi Deputy Head of the German Information and Press Division coined the phrase ‘Baedeker raids’ as the targets all featured in Baedeker’s Great Britain: Handbook For Travellers. ‘We shall go out to bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Guide.’ Severe attacks on Bath, Norwich, Exeter, Canterbury and York were the result.
This visit to Bowen’s Court in July 1942 was the first of many trips Charles would make to the house which Elizabeth soon came to think of as their home. Elizabeth stayed on after he had left. Bowen’s Court was a dreamy house and from now on its dreaminess would be perennially associated with her longing for Charles. Alone, detached from reality and time, she could continue in a fantasy of togetherness, returning to their shared life by entering familiar rooms or gazing at familiar views. In The Heat of the Day, Stella visits Ireland in the autumn of 1942 and spends her days thinking about Robert. She wakes from a deep sleep to be confronted by Robert’s face. She wanders through sun-shafted beech trees, struck by ‘a breathless glory’ which travels through the layered foliage, mysteriously illuminated by the dappled light.
In the secluded Irish countryside, Elizabeth could assess her relationship with both Charles and the war from a distance. Charles’s image remained vivid, while the war seemed at times to recede into unreality. Most people in England in this period who were not directly subject to bombing or fighting felt torn between the competing realities of their day-to-day personal life and the war going on elsewhere. In Ireland, where the war really could seem to disappear altogether, this duality was thrown into relief. The question implicit in all Bowen’s wartime accounts of Ireland is whether it is possible or even desirable to escape the war; whether Irish neutrality made the country a peaceful haven or an irresponsible hiding place.
Bowen’s Court, which had been published shortly before Bowen’s arrival in Ireland, celebrates the enchanted quality of the house and its surroundings but is also dominated by the presence of death. The Ireland of Bowen’s book is a mystical country in which ‘the light, the light-consumed distances, that air of intense existence about the empty country . . . the great part played in society by the dead and by the idea of death’ creates an ‘unearthly disturbance’ in the spirit. Her own house – for centuries the focus of generations of intense living on the part of her ancestors – is peopled by the ghosts of the dead.
Bowen’s awareness of these ghosts had become even more powerful in wartime. She had come from a city that still shimmered with the blood of the recent dead, and the deathliness of Ireland reminded her of this. At the same time, the palpable sense of centuries of Irish dead buried around her had the effect of comfortingly opening up time, suggesting that this war, like others, would pass. Bowen had to decide whether the Irish dead would lull her into forgetfulness or stir her into remembering the war going on elsewhere.
In an afterword to Bowen’s Court written in 1963, Bowen described how the house shielded its wartime inhabitants from the world outside:
Only the wireless in the library conducted the world’s urgency to the place. Wave after wave of war news broke upon the quiet air of the room, and in the daytime when the windows were open, passed out on to the sunny or overcast lawns.
Here was ‘peace at its most ecstatic’ – a sustaining illusion that conjured away the war. She supposed that ‘everyone, fighting or just enduring, carried within him one private image, one peaceful scene. Mine was Bowen’s Court. War made me that image out of a house built of anxious history.’
However, the history remained anxious. The ancestors whose presence pervaded the house had left an atmosphere of apprehension that could not quite be dispelled. ‘Can pain and danger exist?’ Bowen asked herself, surveying the empty countryside from the steps of her peaceful house. The question itself contained the possibility that they could. ‘The scene was a crystal in which, while one was looking, a shadow formed.’ The Elizabeth Bowen who was the author of Bowen’s Court may have been a romantic dreamer who had spent the war immersing herself in the history of her dead Anglo-Irish ancestors. But there was another Elizabeth Bowen who was in Ireland writing war reports for the Ministry of Information and for whom pain and danger could and did exist. She at least was unable to sustain the fantasy that the war stopped just because she herself was no longer attending to it. In the afterword to Bowen’s Court she went on to state that the ‘war-time urgency of the present, its relentless daily challenge’ affected her view of the past. ‘In the savage and austere light of a burning world, details leaped out with significance.’ The waves of news breaking upon the quiet of the library inflected everything that she saw around her.
That news was dominated by the epic battle playing itself out in Russia. By 15 July the Germans were at the gates of Voronezh and Rostov, and the British government was debating whether or not to start a second front. It was a difficult decision to make. Harold Nicolson reflected in his diary that if Britain created a new front as a forlorn hope, just to show support, there would be a defeat as disastrous as Dunkirk. If they did not, they would be accused of letting down the Russians. The Germans then began to close round Rostov, leaving the Russians in danger of being cut off from their oil supplies. By August the Germans were pushing into Stalingrad. But in Ireland, the news took a long time to get through. Bowen reported to the Ministry of Information from Cork on 31 July that the country as a whole was experiencing a ‘greater degree of cut-offness, since last year, with regard to up-to-date war news’. Papers were scarce and arrived late; there were few wireless sets. As a visitor from England, she was eagerly questioned about the war by people who she felt were using it as ‘a form of escapism’. She herself may have been escaping the war by coming to Ireland, but the Irish were apparently escaping their own realities by attending to the war.
The news that did get through was heavily censored. Irish newspapers and radio stations were obliged to maintain a balance between the perspectives of the two sides in their war coverage. As a result, news of bombing in either Britain or Germany, and of the fighting in Russia, had to be brutally edited, because the facts alone were too distressing not to induce people to question the morality of Eire’s neutral stance. When radio stations did decide to present an opinion, they balanced it with a view from the opposite side. Thus, the Irish heard regular broadcasts from the pro-Nazi writer Francis Stuart, a former IRA gunman once championed by Yeats (and married to his muse Maud Gonne’s daughter), who was a direct contemporary of Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O’Faolain. Stuart, who had taken up a post at the University of Berlin in 1940, was now regalin
g the Irish public with tales of the amazing heroism of the German army in Russia.
As always, Bowen divided her time in Ireland between Bowen’s Court and Dublin, and she found that the writers, journalists and politicians whom she met in Dublin now railed against both censorship and, to an extent, the whole policy of neutrality. ‘Eire feels as strongly, one might say as religiously, about her neutrality as Britain feels about her part in the war,’ Bowen had explained to English readers in an article in the New Statesman and Nation in April 1941. ‘She has taken a stand – a stand, as she sees it, alone.’ However, many former enthusiasts for the policy were now losing patience. Bowen’s own cousin Hubert Butler had initially championed neutrality as an active anti-Nazi stance that would enable the Irish to combine pacifism with working, as Butler himself was doing, to save European refugees from Nazi persecution. In the autumn of 1940, when both the British and the Irish were expecting a joint attack from Germany, this sense of the Irish collaborating with Britain in defeating Hitler was still tenable. But by the summer of 1941, Butler was already starting to feel more disillusioned. He complained in The Bell that Ireland was surrounded by ‘an ocean of indifference and xenophobia’, fiercely guarding its own insularity.
Since the autumn of 1940, both de Valera and his policy of neutrality had confronted a passionate opponent in the figure of James Dillon, the deputy leader of Fine Gael, the main opposition to de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party. From the start of the war, Dillon had suggested that there was a thin line between neutrality and indifference, protesting against the isolationist element of neutrality. In a debate in Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil, on 17 July 1941, Dillon stated explicitly that neutrality was ‘not in the true interests, moral or material, of the Irish people’. The Irish knew that the Allies were on the side of right, and it was mere fear of German bombing that deterred them. Dillon’s views carried little weight. As far as de Valera was concerned, the Irish had ‘no responsibility for the present war’. And public opinion remained against Dillon, especially after he gave a speech in February 1942 insisting that Ireland could not stand aloof from the world conflict and that duty and history forced Ireland to be on the side of the Allies. Dillon reminded the Irish of their friendship with America and warned them that
if, in some awful hour, our people commit the supreme folly of accepting in exchange for the traditional Irish-American alliance any form of co-operation from the Nazi-Fascist Powers of Europe, it will be merely the introduction to a development which will end in this country being turned into a German Gibraltar of the Atlantic.
Bowen had met Dillon on each of her visits since November 1940. On first impressions, she liked him, though she could see why he was widely disliked. She reported that he held some views which ‘even I distrust, and which are abhorrent to many Irish people whose integrity I respect . . . He is less parochial in outlook than most Irishmen: in fact, not parochial at all.’ In her report of 9 February 1942 Bowen noted that ‘Mr Dillon’s uncompromising attitude is said to have lost him a good deal of support’. The country was frightened of him, believing that he would like to bring Ireland into the war. In fact, Bowen thought that Dillon merely wanted to open the pros and cons of Irish neutrality to the ‘fair and reasonable debate’ prevented by de Valera who, as far as Dillon was concerned, had broken the country’s spirit with his exploitation of the widespread fear of German invasion or bombing.
By the time of Bowen’s 20 February report, Dillon had resigned. She was not surprised. His speech had been too dramatic, stirring up ‘an almost neurotic anger and fear’ among people who had already ‘lost face – with themselves, with each other’. In Dublin, he had lost the support even of those who thought Ireland should have entered the war in the first place. Bowen continued to meet Dillon after his resignation, and on 31 July she reported his belief that the general fervour on the subject of Eire’s neutrality was beginning to lapse. For Dillon, this fervour was rooted first in national vanity and second in fear, both of which were on the decline. As far as he was concerned, the public was demoralised by the acknowledged timidity of Eire’s attitude. Children and young people had less respect for their leaders and suspected the older generation of ‘dishonesty, of turning the blind eye’.
Bowen was inclined to agree with Dillon. At the beginning of the war Eire, preparing to defend her neutrality, had ‘claimed the right to regard herself as a land of heroes’. Now, most of that ‘heroic illusion’ had been stripped from neutrality. Instead she thought that it had come to be seen as ‘a dreary and negative state – the sheer negative of “not being in the war” ’. Having accepted the reality of the war, even within the seclusion of Bowen’s Court, Bowen now demanded that the Irish accept it too. The glory of neutrality was fading and she applauded the fact that the Irish were candid enough to admit ‘this drop in height’, no longer regarding participation in the war with the same entrenched reluctance as they had two years earlier.
Perhaps most of all, the Irish resented the fact that they had all the deprivations of the war effort without the moral high ground of fighting a war. In his editorial for the January 1942 issue of Horizon, which was devoted to Ireland, Cyril Connolly declared that the predicament was serious, warning his English readers to ‘stop thinking of Ireland as an uncharitable earthly paradise’: ‘The shops are full of good things to eat, the streets of people who cannot afford to buy them. Light and heat are desperately short, for there is very little coal, and turf is scarce through lack of transport.’ For Stella, visiting Ireland in The Heat of the Day, the exciting sensation of being outside war concentrates itself in the ‘fearless lights’ possible in a country without a nightly blackout. As her ship draws into the Dublin harbour, the windows appear to blaze out. Dazzling reflections in damp streets make Dublin seem to be in the midst of a carnival. Yet Stella does not realise that in fact fuel and candles are rationed here as well; she alone is burning up the house’s supplies for months ahead.
Meanwhile Sean O’Faolain and his circle were still committed to neutrality as a policy, but resented the anaesthetising effects of Irish isolationism. O’Faolain complained about the ‘queer feeling of unrealism’ resulting from the lack of clear war news, comparing the perpetual silence and guarded reticence to the atmosphere of a genteel tea party. On her February 1942 visit to Ireland, Bowen had reported that her ‘general impression of Eire – or rather, Dublin – on this visit was that the country was morally and nervously in a state of deterioration’. She was left with the impression of isolation.
O’Faolain countered Ireland’s remoteness by including frequent discussion of European, Ulster, British and Anglo-Irish culture in his monthly literary magazine The Bell. The July 1942 issue was devoted to Northern Ireland, which O’Faolain lauded for its capacity to ‘live and act in the Now’ (‘Belfast has immediacy. Ulster has contemporaneity’). He also insistently retained an even-handed approach to British and to Anglo-Irish culture, emphasising its role within Ireland. In his November 1942 editorial, he dismissed the ‘small but very vocal number of people’ who called themselves Gaels and were determined to throw aside the Anglo-Irish strain in Irish life. These Irishmen with ‘their backs to the wall’ were acting and thinking, he complained, as if Landlordism still existed. They went on hating England as if it were still the nineteenth century. They were ‘unable to begin to build a free Ireland because their minds stopped dead thirty years ago in an Ireland that was not free’.
In O’Faolain’s new Ireland, there was plenty of room for the Anglo-Irish, and Bowen’s frequent appearances in The Bell were evidence of this. Between August and November 1942 she featured in four successive issues. There was a review of Bowen’s Court in August, an interview with her in September, a short story (‘Sunday Afternoon’) in October, and an extract from Seven Winters, Bowen’s short autobiographical account of her Dublin childhood, in November. The division inherent in Bowen’s position in Ireland was clear in these articles. She was represented in The Bell partly as a vo
ice from England; a reminder of the wider life going on outside Ireland. But she was also there as an anachronistic vestige of the lost world of Big Houses and dreamy countryside that O’Faolain himself had enjoyed for the two years of their affair. If the Irish were aware that they were in an unreal position in relation to Britain and Europe, then they (or perhaps more specifically O’Faolain himself) could displace some of this unreality onto the Anglo-Irish now represented by Bowen.
This is evident in the August review of Bowen’s Court by D. A. Binchy, who was generous but somewhat patronising both to Bowen herself and to the Anglo-Irish in general. As a scholar of linguistics, Binchy was well qualified to point out Bowen’s ‘minor errors’ (she was mistaken, for example, in her explanation of her ‘perfectly regular pronunciation of her straightforward Celtic surname’). But he was impressed by her frankness in condemning the abuses of power exercised by her ancestors, and he was prepared to admit that the Anglo-Irish had played a crucial and even a beneficial role in the cultural history of Ireland. For Binchy, it was a tragedy that the new Ireland, in whose construction the Anglo-Irish might have been involved, had been built without them, ‘nay against them’; ‘and that it is infinitely the poorer therefore no one, except the professional patriot and the synthetic Gael, is likely to deny’. He pronounced this overall ‘a grand book’, in which Bowen had been led by the spirit of her house through the corridors of its own past.
The October edition story, ‘Sunday Afternoon’, was effectively a description of Elizabeth Bowen’s own wartime trips to Ireland which made explicit her role as a visitor from the battlefield to a scene of unreal peace. Henry Russel, an Anglo-Irishman living in London, returns to the Big House and the old friends ‘in whose shadow he had grown up’. Arriving, he joins the group on a lawn unchanged for centuries and is asked ‘What are your experiences? – Please tell us. But nothing dreadful: we are already feeling a little sad.’ For Henry, arriving from a bombed city in which his own flat has been completely destroyed, the atmosphere is one of suspended charm. The ‘sensations of wartime that locked his inside being’ are gradually dispelled ‘in the influence of this eternalised Sunday afternoon’.