21 MAY 1983, Page 23

Elizabeth Bowen

A. N. Wilson

The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen (Cape £7.95) To the North Elizabeth Bowen (Cape £7.95)

The old uniform edition of Elizabeth Bowen (brought out in the 1940s and 1950s) was an object lesson in how novels ought to be produced. The small scale, and the elegance of each volume matched the quality of the contents, as did the extremely sombre black and white illustrations (always more black than white) which pro- vided frontispieces. The books were small enough to slip into a pocket or hand-bag and be read on the bus. This, again, is en- tirely appropriate, for she is best tasted in snatches. The pleasure of reading her is largely a delight in her mannerisms and in her bleak and pitiless depiction of human character. Even a short book like To the North is wasted if it is read at a sitting. The most ardent lover of anchovies would not make a meal of them.

Cape have mysteriously decided to aban- don the old uniform edition and to reissue her books in an unpleasing new format, with tiny print, asymmetrical margins, no frontispiece illustration, ugly typographical chapter-headings (like headlines in The Bookseller) and such a liberal number of misprints that even the most hedonistic lounger turns proof-reader while perusing the pages. Why could the publishers not leave a good thing alone?

There is probably no point in making this complaint. The mercy is that Cape are re- issuing the books at all. When Elizabeth Bowen met Tom Maschler (then a dynamic new director of Cape, now the boss) she considered him 'not unlike a Byzantine representation of Our Lord, only without a beard and (at first glance) a rather more ferocious expression'. Had she lived to write many more books after encountering this Christ-like figure, she might very well have found herself the victim of his feroci- ty. For the Byzantine Mr Maschler, instead of driving money-changers from the Tem- ple, pushed out a number of his most stylish authors in order to make room for more brashly commercial self-advertisers. He might well have treated Elizabeth Bowen with the ferocity he displayed to Barbara Pym, who was sacked from the 'list', hav- ing published six novels, with no explana- tion. Mr Maschler refused even to meet her.

Re-reading Elizabeth Bowen, then, has some of the attractions of rattling down a beautiful, but still very serviceable branch line which (by some miracle) Beeching fail- ed to axe. Her novels have not really 'dated', if by that one means growing curly round the edges like stale sandwiches. Both these books have much of the period flavour of the 1930s, when they were writ- ten. It is still the era of servants; and the level of chastity is high. We are meant to be terribly shocked in To the North when poor innocent Emmeline is seduced by the cad- dish Markie. And in The Death of the Heart we are terribly shocked that Eddie holds Daphne's hand in the cinema. In both cases, the awful pain and surprise which the indiscretions engender remain with us, and knock us up; for we have entered wholly in- to the innocent agonies of the heroines.

There isn't much story, or plot, in either book. To the North describes two young women, Cecilia and Emmeline. Cecilia is hard and worldly. We are informed in the opening pages that she does not have a par- ticularly nice character. Emmeline is a romantic and an innocent. Cecilia marries a man whom she does not really love, because the time seems right. Emmeline is caught up with a cad, who does not love her and is go- ing to break her heart. In The Death of the Heart, the brittle worldly woman is called Anna. She lives in a spacious house on the edge of Regent's Park with a husband who bores her. She entertains a very Jamesian circle of male friends, with whom she en- joys all the cynical manipulations of gossip. The innocent, in this tale, is her much younger sister-in-law Portia (16 years old, but in spirit still a child) who has come to live in the house on the death of her mother. Portia falls in love with the most implausible and worthless of Anna's charm- ing visitors, a wastrel called Eddie. She discovers his 'true character' too late; and her broken-hearted escape from the house is, we can have no doubt, abortive, What makes each book so strong, so upsetting, is not the outline of the plot, nor even the roundedness of the characters, so much as the intensity with which the unhap- piness of it all (and its merciless comedy) is felt by the narrative voice.

It is impossible for bores to write in- teresting novels. It is the personality of Elizabeth Bowen, awkward, prickly, man- nered, funny and formidable, which infuses her fiction. Turning back to her books after a gap is to feel some of the shock which deals the sophisticated Anna such a body- blow when she reads Portia's diary in The Death of the Heart. For the innocent, galumphing adolescent has such an acute eye. In the exquisitely wintry first scene, when Anna is wandering in the frozen chill of Regent's Park and telling her friend St Quentin (a writer) about the diary, he asks, 'Tell me, do you remember, the first sentence of all?' `Indeed I do,' Anna said, ' "So 1. am with them, in London" '. 'With a comma after the "them"? .. . The comma is good, that's style'.

We can see now that, more than most novelists, Elizabeth Bowen used the exer- cise of style as a means of exorcising her own impossible nature. She once said that 'the pleasure of writing was equalled elsewhere only in love'. But the reason she became a novelist was that she was better at commas than she was at love. The 'well- edited' house in Regent's Park is her own house; the down-trodden husband is her own husband, Alan Cameron. (At one of her dinner-parties, a guest, in search of a lavatory, once blundered through a door in a passage-way to find Alan Cameron sitting under the stairs eating his supper off a tray). The cold, charming, formidable Anna is a direct portrait of what Mrs Alan Cameron was terrified of becoming herself. But in the same house, there lurks the fragile, canny, mawkish adolescent Portia, who is the undeveloped Elizabeth Bowen, tortured by inarticulacy and the strength of her own emotions. Similarly, in To the North, the callous Cecilia, who can't be, strictly speaking, nice, is Mrs Alan Cameron; and her innocent friend Em- meline is the self Elizabeth Bowen could on- ly expose to men when they were unkind to her.

The novels are not straight autobiography. Even though GoronwY Rees tried to sue her for libel after recognis- ing himself as Eddie in The Death of the

Heart, these books do not reflect incidents in 'real life'. What strikes one anew on a re- reading is how perfectly their personal origins have been subsumed into art. They are magnificent, wholly distinctive novels. If one had to place writers in a league table, I would put Elizabeth Bowen in the First Division: yards ahead of Virginia Woolf, and on a level with her master, Henry James.