The Love-Charm of Bombs (44 page)

Elizabeth Bowen's return to Ireland, 1945

 

Shortly after VJ Day, Elizabeth Bowen returned home to Ireland. She and Alan arrived by boat in the south, steaming up the estuary of the river Suir and landing at Waterford, where they were greeted by rows of high decaying buildings along the quay and a smell of wood smoke in the damp morning air. Elizabeth was ready to leave behind the ruins in London and return to a country whose decay had begun centuries earlier and whose ruins blended unobtrusively and romantically into the landscape.

There was no doubt that this was a homecoming. ‘It is impossible', Elizabeth Bowen wrote in a 1946 essay entitled ‘Ireland makes Irish', ‘to be
in
this small vivid country and not
of
her . . . What has proved so winning, so holding, is, I think, the manner of life here – life infused with a tempo and temperament bred of the magic Irish light and the soft air.'

Soon after her arrival in August, Elizabeth announced to Charles that Ireland, now that she had come back, seemed ‘very amiable and good and sweet'. During the war, Elizabeth had been a Londoner who often identified with England. That had changed on the day of the 1945 election, when she decided that it was an advantage to be Anglo-Irish and to disassociate herself from the situation in England. She told Charles that she was happy to ‘belong to a class, that potted at by the Irish and sold out by the British, has made an art of maintaining its position in vacuo'. As a result, she felt entitled to escape again now. ‘I stare at the outside of this house and think my ancestors didn't care a damn about English politics, and how right they were.'

Elizabeth appreciated the Irish because, unlike the English, they were responding to peace with straightforward enthusiasm.

 

Quite illicitly – I mean, in view of their having been neutrals – everybody is enjoying peace madly; going about with shining and beaming faces. In fact the Irish are the only people I have met so far who are really just getting 100% kick out of world peace. They also remark with justifiable smugness that they always knew this war would end up in Bolshevism, and they are gladder than ever they kept out of it.

 

It took impressive insouciance on the part of the Irish to enjoy the peace unequivocally. After Hitler's death at the end of April, de Valera had somewhat ignominiously followed official protocol for neutral countries by formally offering his condolences to the German Minister in Dublin. As far as the British were concerned, Ireland now had no right to celebrate the peace. Churchill tempered the jubilatory note of his VE Day broadcast with a taunt at ‘the action of Mr de Valera' who, ‘so much at variance with the temper and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battle-front to prove their ancient valour', had denied the Allies access to the ports. ‘This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we would have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish forever from the earth.' De Valera retaliated, shocked by Churchill's suggestion that given sufficient necessity Britain might have been forced to violate Ireland's neutrality, by accusing Churchill of disregarding the autonomy of small nations in a manner comparable to Hitler. He nonetheless thanked Churchill for avoiding the temptation on this occasion. It was hard for the strong to be just to the weak ‘but acting justly always has its rewards'.

Unlike Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen did not grudge her compatriots their moment of glory. Politically, she had now lost patience with England as well as Ireland; personally, she was grateful that the Irish at least were entering the post-war era with style and gaiety. Elizabeth was also appreciative of the comparative luxury available in rural Cork. Here at least, Ireland did seem to be the land of plenty it was portrayed as during the war. Elizabeth informed Charles that although there was not much soap (a deficit remedied by the supplies he sent from Canada), there was, thanks to the kindness of friends, plenty of cream, peaches, eggs, meat, lobsters and butter. ‘The sense of profusion, ease, courtesy, leisure, space drips like warm honey over one's nerves,' she added gratefully, though she was aware that elsewhere in the country things were still as bad as in England. ‘The food in all Co Cork houses (other than mine where it is rather haphazard) is simply marvellous,' she boasted in September,‘swimming in cream and cakes and hot scones running with melted butter. I suppose, strictly, Irish country house life is the last form of comfortable, old-fashioned existence left anywhere in Europe. How absolutely furious it would make the British.' Most of all, Elizabeth appreciated the silence of Bowen's Court because it gave her the imaginative space she needed to write and the leisure to think, uninterrupted, about Charles. ‘This house', she wrote to him shortly after her arrival, ‘was built by that long-ago, unconscious Bowen for you and me to be happy in. That July when you and I were here it reached its height. It will again when you're back. I often wonder what time of year that will be.'

Elizabeth had arrived at the house with Alan and, practically, they were in the process of arranging their future there together. She told William Plomer that their plans were fluid. They still had Clarence Terrace but had sublet the top floors to a BBC couple. Alan's health was deteriorating. One of his eyes had been bad since the First World War, when he had suffered from trench poisoning, and he now had a cataract in the other eye. He also had a weak heart, which was exacerbated by his weight and heavy drinking. Now he resigned from the BBC and took up a new job as educational adviser for the gramophone and record company EMI. This would allow him to be in Ireland more and the current plan was to move most of their furniture to Bowen's Court and to base themselves there.

But for Elizabeth it was a large and dreamy enough house to contain both her actual life with Alan and her imagined life with Charles. Over the course of the summer, she settled down into a routine of sleepily repetitive days, writing, gardening and dreaming. She wrote in the morning; she cut down nettles after tea; and, writing to Charles, she was able to inscribe him in the rhythm of her days. ‘It is a drowsy late-August afternoon,' she wrote, ushering him into the scene. ‘I am writing in the library with the windows open. One large blue bottle fly is bumbling about the ceiling: outdoors there is a hum of unspecified insects in the trees. The sky is overcast, but there is a sort of sheen of obstructed sunshine on the heavy dark-green trees and the grass.'

In Ireland, Elizabeth could take stock of her feelings since Charles's departure in January. She looked back on her summer in London as a miserable nightmare, which had culminated in the election. Since then she had been feeling aggressive and disaffected: ‘I can't dis-obsess myself from the feeling that democracy has celebrated its victory by being had for a mutt in a big way.' In her disappointment about the election, Elizabeth was in line with many of her friends and social class. But the intensity of her reaction was unusual; few of her friends responded to the results by being physically sick. The election had become imbued with all the desperate helplessness of her longing for Charles. This was a summer that she would always remember with repugnance. ‘Like when one's inside is upset, everything has disagreed with me. I have desired nothing (that I could have) and enjoyed nothing.' She dated the nightmare as beginning in January, with Charles's departure.

Now, Elizabeth was learning to be happy again. ‘Right or wrong, I cannot tell you how well all this agrees with me,' she told Charles in September. She could now admit to him the scale of her unhappiness during the summer. ‘I really was getting into a most odd state in London, Charles. I don't know what would have happened if I had stayed there much longer.' She revealed that she had woken up almost every morning in floods of tears. And at times she had caught herself groaning aloud with exasperation.

Escaping to a place where she was able to disassociate herself from English politics, she was also learning strategies to survive Charles's absence. The most effective was to ensconce herself, even more than she had in June, in the imaginary life they shared. ‘To one person you are an entire world,' Elizabeth wrote to Charles at the beginning of September. In this letter she admits that, since January, she has been living on the vague hope (‘a hope I never openly formulated, but clung to') that he might reappear. Now that she had left London, she could begin to live once again in the present, and it was a present which could include Charles even in his absence. ‘I don't know how I should live if it were not for letters,' she told him.

 

How would one not (as you say), without the beloved evidence of a letter, come to torment oneself with the fear that love and the entire world of life that surrounds it was an illusion, subjective, brain-spun. As it is, the unfolding of a letter from you, the whole cast and shape of the handwriting on the paper, even before I have begun to read what is written, gives me a sort of rush of nearness.

 

Writing to Charles enabled Elizabeth to imagine their shared existence at Bowen's Court. Receiving his letters allowed her to picture herself with him in Canada.

 

The hour – day or evening – in which you write, the things round you, the Ottawa bells ringing (like when you wrote last) envelops me. Partly, of course, it stirs up an agonising restlessness. But the happiness, the whole sense and aura of you is worth that.

 

Although she had never been there, she felt nostalgic for the early autumn Ottawa weather, with its crisp air and red leaves. She was also envisaging the life they could share in New York and finding that the fantasy evoked the make-believe lives she had imagined while looking out at the same Irish countryside as an only child; ‘a life lived to the last detail, so real one could hear curtains rustle in imaginary rooms, and street-sounds in a city one was not in.'

There is a sense in which, cut off from her London life, Elizabeth was living with Charles. Writing to him, reading and rereading his letters, picturing him in the house in which they had been so happy together, she came close to sharing her life with him. All this time, Elizabeth was in fact living with Alan; but it was a marriage that gave her the mental space to keep Charles almost permanently in her mind. ‘I have felt particularly near you all this last week,' she wrote to him; ‘so much so that sometimes I can't bear to be spoken to; as though someone else had come into the room when we were together.' She could feel his presence and she could hear his voice: ‘It wakes me up, sometimes, in the night when I'm asleep.'

But at the same time, Elizabeth was fighting continued sadness and fear. In the letter where she mentioned being woken by Charles's voice in the night, Elizabeth attempted to advise him on the question of whether to live in Europe or Canada, though she was aware that the ‘fors and againsts' were maddeningly complicated and that it was hard for her to be dispassionate. She could see that he needed to use the full force of his brain, and that this was more possible in Ottawa. On the other hand, she could not bear the thought of his suppressing his imagination and sensuality, and was convinced that he had ‘a power to live through feeling and apprehension which makes you in nature more an artist or a poet than any orthodox artist or poet I have ever known.' She was worried that in Canada he was losing touch with the artist and the poet and therefore with the lover. ‘And, how can you or I live without love? Without that, one feels an exile any place that one is.' She herself felt exiled, even at Bowen's Court. As always, Elizabeth's fears about Charles were entwined with her anxieties about post-war Europe. She longed for the new Europe to crystallise so that Charles could find a home in which his whole nature could be fulfilled, but worried that it would take years. ‘War brutalised physical life; post-war seems to dissipate, in a way that is almost brutalising, psychic life.'

Elizabeth was right to worry about the hardening of Charles's heart. On the same day that she was writing this letter, he was reflecting in his diary that he had become inured to life without her. ‘I don't think of E as much as I did. I don't even think about myself.' Like her, he feared his own petrification: ‘How long can I stand this midday light of commonplace common sense which is the light of middle age? How long can I stand the neatness and emptiness of my life? And in a way I am quite content.' In this first post-war autumn, the pattern of their long-distance love affair was established. There were times when both Elizabeth and Charles believed that they loved each other equally. But Charles, unlike Elizabeth, lost the sense of powerful togetherness during their separations. She could live in the imaginary world created by their letters, reinforcing it through her novels, with their intense, consuming love affairs. He was unable to believe in the fairy tale of their love without her being present to give it a tangible reality. And when his feelings for Elizabeth proved too complicated to assimilate, he diverted himself by indulging in easier liaisons with younger women.

Meanwhile, during the brief periods when she was not thinking about Charles, Elizabeth continued to distract herself with fierce sessions of violent gardening. Even when she felt melancholy and exiled without love, she could be engrossed and soothed by the everyday, concrete problems of the house. Writing to William Plomer, she described this as a process of rejuvenation.

 

I came over here feeling like death, full of visitations and repugnances, but am feeling much better now. I have worked like a black out of doors (hewing down nettles and undergrowth, clearing woods) which was just what I wanted, and hardly laid pen to paper or finger to type-writer . . . I think I have the makings of a better forester than gardener: plenty of brute strength and aggression instinct, but the reverse of green fingers – in fact almost anything I plant dies.