The House in Paris
Read The House in Paris Online
Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen
with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt
First published in Great Britain by Gollancz 1935 Published in Penguin Books in Great Britain 1946 Reprinted with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt 1976 Reprinted 1983, 1986
First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1935 Published in Penguin Books in the United States of America by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1987
Copyright 1935 by Elizabeth Cameron Copyright © renewed by Elizabeth D. C. Cameron, 1963 Introduction copyright © A. S. Byatt, 1976 All rights reserved
Contents
12
Introduction
M
Y
relationship with
The House in Paris
has been odd, continuous and shifting, for roughly thirty years. It has had a disproportionate influence, both good and bad, on my ideas about the writing of novels and, indeed, about the nature of fiction. It seems proper to begin by explaining this since I do now believe it to be both the best of Elizabeth Bowen's novels, and a very good novel by any critical standards. But the reading process behind these judgments has been complicated.
I was given
The House in Paris
by my father when I was quite a small child, maybe ten or eleven, roughly the age of Henrietta in the novel itself. My father was under the impression that the book was a historical novel, having mistaken Elizabeth Bowen for the historical writer, Marjorie Bowen. I began the book, a compulsive reader, having already worked my way through most of Scott and much of Dickens, expecting to find a powerful plot, another world to inhabit, love, danger. I found instead my first experience of a wrought, formalized 'modern' novel, a novel which played tricks with time and point of view. A novel, also (and this I remember clearly as being supremely important), which clarified, or would have clarified if I had been clever enough to focus it, the obscure, complex and alarming relationships between children, sex and love. There were powerful phrases which lodged in my mind and have stayed there. 'Years before sex had power to touch his feeling it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives.' Or, 'The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell.' Or, 'There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.' I finished the book, deeply uncertain about what was happening, deeply troubled about how to judge the relative weight of any of the events or people. I read it, in fact, with a social, sexual and narrative innocence which was the equivalent of Henrietta's own. I learned, from that reading, two things. First, that 'the modern novel' was difficult: it stopped and analysed little things, when you wanted to get on with big things — it made it clear to you that you did not understand events, or other people. And, more important, more durable, I learned that Elizabeth Bowen had
got Henrietta right.
Adult readers are too given to saying, of children like Henrietta, that 'real' children are not so sophisticated, so articulate, so thoughtful. What I remember with absolute clarity from this reading was a feeling that the private analyses I made to myself of things were vindicated, the confusions I was aware of were real, and presumably important and interesting, since here they were described. There is a sense in which Henrietta, and indeed Leopold, are more subtle images of the innocent or immature perception of adult behaviour than James's Maisie, in
What Maisie Knew.
Maisie is a
tour de force,
a brilliant creation, a vehicle both for James's technical mastery and for his moral commentary. But Leopold, and still more Henrietta, are children equipped with the language of the secret thoughts of intelligent children, with no more and no less than that. They make Maisie seem very much a creature of adult artifice.
After this innocent reading I put the book away for some years. In my late teens I read it again, several times; focused now much more on Karen and the central section of the novel, on love, passion, the breaking of convention, the moment of truth, the definition of identity. At that stage I think I saw the novel very strongly as a model of good writing, an example of how to be precise about thought, emotion, passion and character. To me then the restaurant scene in Boulogne, the bedroom scene in Hythe, seemed to be the central scenes, remarkable for concentrating so much passion in so few words, for the violence of life one looked for in books and feared to miss in reality.
Later still I came to think less well of the novel, dismissing it as too much a work of 'fine-drawn sensibility'. It seemed too much the novel-as-object, inexorably shaped and limited by its own internal laws. I had by then read James, Forster, Woolf, Ford: 'modernism' no longer shocked or confused me. I became a discriminating reader and saw merits in the heavy, broad, open-ended Victorian novels, admired by Dr Leavis and Iris Murdoch, which made Elizabeth Bowen's precise distinctions, her craftsmanship, appear minor virtues, and her world, so economically, so selectively presented, appear shadowy. And then, recently, I read the novel again and saw that it is one of those books that grow in the mind, in time. As it is impossible at Henrietta's age to realize the nature of sex, however aware one is of its presence, so at the age when one is necessarily interested in imperative passion, the identity of the character stripped for action, decisive or disastrous, it is impossible to
realize
that sex has a history, that children are the result of sex, that children are people, produced by other people's sexual behaviour, and that with children, as with lovers and husbands, relationships of some complexity exist. One may think as a child reader, as a young reader, that one is aware of the relationship of Leopold to the plot of the book. But to recognize the full emotional force of his existence one has simply and necessarily to have lived through a certain amount of time. As with Henrietta, I came to realize that Elizabeth Bowen had got Leopold right. His claims on the reader's attention, on the other characters' attention, are justified morally and artistically.
I have described this reading and re-reading at such length because it is at the least an indication of some imaginative force in Elizabeth Bowen, but also because it was, with this novel, a peculiarly valuable way into its themes and subject matter.
The House in Paris
is a novel about sex, time, and the discovery of identity. That my readings of it in some way reflected the process it was dealing with was, in the end, my good luck.
'Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her
Notes on Writing a Novel
(1945, reprinted in
Collected Impressions,
Longmans, Green & Co., 1950) with this statement. I think, finally, it is in the simple brilliance of the plot that the power of
The House in Paris
lies. It is a plot of considerable primitive force — child in search of unknown parents, parents in search of unknown child, love and death as identical moments of extremity. It works by playing these powerful emotions and events off against the confusions, the limitations, the continuities created by a particular civilization, a particular time and culture. Thus in the first part, 'The Present', Leopold and Henrietta are both attempting to define, or assert, their own identities, which are thrown into relief by the alien quality of the enclosing Anglo-French house in Paris inhabited by adult passions, and equally by adult social conventions, with which they are not used to dealing. Leopold is in a state of disaster and crisis: Henrietta is a normal little girl, trying to deal with tragedy through a set of responses formed only for controlled social situations.
'Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta's character, which, built up by herself, for herself, out of admonitions and axioms (under the growing stress of: If I am Henrietta, then what is
Henrietta
?) was a mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice. She was anxious to be someone, and, no one having ever voiced a prejudice in her hearing without impressing her, had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be a someone without disliking things ... Now she sat biting precisely into her half of roll, wondering how one could bear to eat soppy bread' (pages 25-6). Henrietta 'longed already to occupy people's fancies, speculations, and thoughts'. Whereas Leopold, brought up by his adopted parents, was 'over understood ... He knew too well these people found him remarkable ... Where he came from, kindness thickened the air and sentiment fattened on the mystery of his birth. Years before sex had power to touch his feeling it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives. There was no one he could ask frankly: "Just how odd
is
all this?" The disengaged Henrietta had been his first looking-glass' (pages 34-5). Leopold's situation of extremity and indefiniteness is emphasized by the letter he reads from the adopted parents, with its complete ignorance of his nature and needs, its grotesque emphasis on his dangerous heredity and possible digestive upsets.
We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology. When the revelation regarding himself must come, what better prototypes could he find than the Greek and other heroes, we feel. His religious sense seems still to be dormant. We are educating him on broad undenominational lines such as God is Love.
We have of course no idea
what
revelations Leopold's mother may see fit to make, but we do trust you will beg her to be discreet and have regard for his temperament and the fact that he has not yet received direct sex-instruction. Almost any fact she might mention seems to us still unsuitable (page 41).
Leopold's reading of this letter, at a point when the reader is as unaware as he is of the possible nature of his mother's 'revelations' and indeed of his mother, is a brilliant piece of plotting. So is the transition from Leopold's quest for self in Part I to Karen's quest for self in Part II, 'The Past'. The transition from Leopold's mother's non-appearance to the account she did not give him of how he had come to be is masterly. It is not simply authorial sleight-of-hand that gives Elizabeth Bowen the authority to open her fictional account of Leopold's origins with a claim that an
imaginary
mother, like a work of art, can tell the truth because she is not encumbered by either time or conventions. 'The mother who did not come to meet Leopold that afternoon remained his creature, able to speak the truth ... He did not have to hear out with grave discriminating intelligence that grown-up falsified view of what had been once that she, coming in actually, might have given him. She, in the flesh, could have offered him only that in reply to the questions he had kept waiting so long for her: 'Why am I? What made me be?'
And Elizabeth Bowen adds that 'the meeting he had projected could take place only in Heaven — call it Heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word' (page 67).
Elizabeth Bowen's definition of the object of a novel is directly relevant here. It is also as good a statement of the complex relations of truth and fiction as I know. 'Plot must further the novel towards its object. What object? The non-poetic statement of a poetic truth ... Have not all poetic truths already been stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.' Earlier in the same essay she said that plot, as well as being story, 'is also "a story" in the nursery sense = lie. The novel lies, in saying something happened, that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth to warrant the original lie.' Thus Leopold's projected talk with Karen is a lie, as Elizabeth Bowen's novel is a lie, but both are charged with 'poetic truth' and related to each other. And there is a sense, one of the real achievements of the book, in which the following flashback to Karen's love for Max carries the plot forward. The 'poetic truth' of this novel, as I see it, is about the discovery of identity, and in this sense the woman, Karen, and the man. Max, are continuations of the children Leopold and Henrietta, although they are also means to the re-definition, the restatement, of the child Leopold, in the light of our knowledge of them. That is, the reader moves forward from childhood to young adult love, although the narrative time shifts backwards.
