Inventing Ireland (51 page)

During the
Easter Rebellion of 1916, while gunfire raked across St. Stephen's Green as Countess Markievicz and her force engaged the British army, afternoon tea was served at the usual time in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel. We know this because Elizabeth Bowen records it in her elegant history of that ascendancy institution. She was well aware from personal experience of the uses of such nonchalance: to her, polite behaviour was something which "does really help to jack up morale".
¹
When the Rising broke out, she was away at school in England. News of it was her first indication that something like a national revival had been afoot. Like many of the heroines of her books, she found herself away from the scene of the action when something decisive was happening: the national revival had been judged far too inconsequential a thing for her own Anglo-Irish family to form any clear opinion
of
it. "Who would ever have thought the Irish would turn out so disloyal?"
²
might well be taken as typical of their reaction.

The Rising was, among other things, a systematic attempt to restore Dublin's metropolitan status, lost since the Act of Union: the Anglo-Irish gentry were by 1916 hopeless provincials, if by provincial one means to indicate people who have no sense of their own presence. Their world, as depicted by Bowen, is one whose members are constantly isolated from the wider society around them by the great walls encircling their demesnes: major events unfold on the other side of those walls, events which the aristocrats within make a point of not noticing. Unlike Edith Somerville, who studied the Irish language and kept abreast of the progress of the Gaelic League, the occupants of
Bowen's Court in County Cork built their lives on "the negation of mystical Ireland".
³
Her ancestors, she freely conceded, had driven Gaelic culture "underground, with its ceaseless poetry of lament";
⁴
now, though a revival was in full swing, she showed no great curiosity
about it. This was a mark of baffled incomprehension rather than ill-will: in her early years, she had been so sheltered that she had no idea that Protestants did not make up the
majority religion in Ireland. An only
child, she was shunted between Ireland and England, away from an ailing father and into the care of a mother who died suddenly when Elizabeth was only thirteen. If she grew up
"farouche,
haughty, quite ignorant of the outside world", the sort of self-invention in such a condition was perfectly typical of her class:

It is possible that
Anglo-Irish people, like only children, do not know how much they miss. Their existences, like those of only children, are singular, independent, secretive.
⁵

The Anglo-Irish curbed their feeling, because their prosperity was erected on "a situation that shows an inherent wrong", the expropriation of the native Irish. Most relationships with the natives could only have issued in unpleasant accusation: it was better, therefore, to confine them to a few loyal cooks and retainers. For the rest, "the new ascendancy lacked feeling, in fact feeling would have been fatal to it". No wonder that Elizabeth Bowen became an expert analyst of the death of the heart. She saw hers as a class which, unlike its English counterpart, achieved its position through injustice – "the structure of the great Anglo-Irish society was raised over a country in martyrdom"
⁶
– and subsequently failed to justify its privilege by service. It enjoyed power without taking responsibility for the wider countryside over which it ruled: instead, it simply pulled up the drawbridge. That this suited the more lethargic and unambitious commoners as well as overlords was among the least of its recommendations:

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness, but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round . . . The greater part of them being
Catholics, and he in most cases a Protestant, they are kept from him by the barrier of a different faith . . . (and) a good-mannered, faintly cynical tolerance, largely founded on classes letting each other alone.
⁷

This stand-off may have been less pleasant for both parties than she implies.
The Last September,
set in Cork during the War of Independence, tells of a big house whose younger members yearn for some intrusion from the world of actual rebels; and a former insurgent himself,
Seán Ó Faoláin, in reading the book could not help wishing
for one of a different kind, a truly contrapuntal narrative about a Danielstown House "that was at least aware of the Ireland outside . . . that, perhaps, regretted the division enough to admit it was there".
⁸
Protesting against the elegant self-enclosure of the novel, he asked for Irish books which were not water-tight compartments:
Gogol in
Dead Souls
had linked divided worlds, and
Chekhov had many stories about doctors who climbed walls. Bowen knew exactly what he meant, remarking in a subsequent interview in
The Bell
that when the Great Irish Novel would finally be written "I fancy you'll find that it has been written by a Protestant who understands Catholicism and who, very probably, has made a mixed marriage".
⁹
For her own part, it was scarcely her fault that she had found such knowledge unavailable, encountering in her earlier years "an almost sexual shyness on the subject of Roman Catholics".

It might be added that what gives
The Last September
much of its bittersweet poignancy is the innocence of the Anglo-Irish as they go to meet their doom:

If Ireland did not accept them, they did not know it – and it is in that unawareness of final rejection, unawareness of being looked at from some secretive, opposed life, that the Anglo-Irish naive dignity and, even, tragedy, seem to me to stand. Themselves, they felt Irish and acted as Irishmen.
¹⁰

This poignancy rises to a genuinely tragic resonance in the fact that, having blocked off feeling, these people now seem as admirably unaware of their own suffering as they once were so scandalously unaware of the pain which they inflicted on the dispossessed. A similar imperviousness, if not to feeling then at least to its overt expression, was noted in Elizabeth Bowen by friends and contemporaries. Like others of her kind, she lived at a certain remove from her own emotions, some part of her always held in reserve and able to monitor an experience, even as she submitted to it, with a cold, clinical precision. This observant detachment had long been a feature of Anglo-Irish writing, which achieved an almost anthropological status, seeking to view man as if he were a foreign, even non-human, witness of himself: but, in the writings of Bowen, existence takes on "the trance-like quality of a spectacle",
¹¹
not only for the author who anatomizes it but for those caught up in it as well.

The English planters who had occupied Ireland were, in a sense, the first Provisionals, by no means certain of their tenure in a land where they would always be outnumbered by those whom they had extirpated.
They knocked down the woods which had sheltered recalcitrant rebels, and huckstered off the leavings at sixpence a tree. If their grander houses seemed built for eternity, that was largely to allay the fear that they might be going home on the next boat: the exterior show of spaciousness and command was intended to mask an inner uncertainty. All they had to protect themselves against the avenging masses was an attitude, an assumed
style. Elizabeth
Bowen wrote that the big house of rural Ireland was "like
Flaubert's ideal book, about nothing",
¹²
something which constructed itself around a lack, sustaining itself by the inner force of its style. This style, like the Yeatsian antiself, represented an ideal of courtly behaviour and
sprezzatura
to which the new ascendancy might aspire: it helped the founders of the line cope with the thought that their tenure might only be provisional, and it enabled the final descendants to maintain a semblance of defiant decorum long after the tradition had started to collapse. The training of the Anglo-Irish turned out to be an arduous preparation for the moment when style was all that they had left... for those takers of the toast and tea at the Shelbourne Hotel. The manner remained intact long after the men and women themselves had snapped.

For Bowen herself, all of this made a perfect sense in terms of her art. If the Anglo-Irish were a hyphenated people, forever English in Ireland, forever Irish in England, then she knew that better than most. At school in England, she played up her wild Irish side, yet she also tried to make herself more English than the English by her perfect decorum and style. Her truest sense of herself may have come when she was in motion, crossing from one country to another, in the manner of her heroine Lois in
The Last September:

She shut her eyes and tried – as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in misery between Holyhead and Kingstown – to be enclosed in a nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble.
¹³

There is a real desperation here, for the bubble which she creates is grimly like the self-enclosed estate at Danielstown: and if you start out building a Utopia, you may indeed end up nowhere.

Bowen's own style, mannered but functional, was formed (like that of the big house) as a mode in which a desperate soul sought an assured sense of identity: she turned to art for a stability which was unobtainable in the world. That style prefigured an ideal version of herself which she might yet live up to. It had the additional advantage of offering the marooned daughter an attitude with which to address a society: "My
writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books
are
my relation to society".
¹⁴
Nothing made full sense to her that was not in print. She wrote not so much to record as to invent a self, a self which lived on the hyphen between "Anglo" and "Irish". And she explored that moment when the self peeps out of its cocoon in
The Last September,
the novel for which she always confessed a special feeling of tenderness.

Set in the
Troubles of 1920, the story centres on Lois Farquar, the orphaned niece of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, owners of the Danielstown estate. Outside rebel soldiers engage in the final phase of a war of liberation against the British, one of whose soldiers, Gerald Lesworth, falls in love with Lois: inside, the Naylors and their visitors concentrate on tennis parties and dances. The house epitomizes order and continuity, the values on which it is assumed that Lois will pattern her life; but it exacts a huge tribute from its occupiers, condemning them to cold nights and claustrophobic days. Lois feels haunted by the house, because its lack of an inner dynamic seems a reflection of her own:

And she could not try to explain . . . how after every return – awakening, even, from sleep or preoccupation – she and those home surroundings further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.
¹⁵

She is, therefore, immobilized by the very traditions which, in theory, should uplift her.

It would be facile
to
present her life as a stalemate between self-expression in Gerald's arms and doing the right thing by the Naylors, who disapprove of such an attachment. In truth, she trusts her own feelings too little to know whether what she experiences with the English soldier is love. The forms of good
behaviour have preceded her to every experience. In the company of a world-weary older man, whom she rather fancies, a Mr. Montmorency, she wonders how her carefree dancing up the estate avenue must appear in his eyes:

He had seemed amazed at her being young when he wasn't. She could not hope to explain that her youth seemed to her also rather theatrical and that she was only young in that way because people expected it. She had never refused a role . . . She could not hope to assure him she was enjoying anything he had missed, that she was now unconvinced and anxious but
intended to be quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once been happy. For to explain this – were explanation possible to so courteous, ironical and unfriendly a listener – would, she felt, be disloyal to herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.
¹⁶

For
Bowen, there is not necessarily anything ignoble about this willingness of Lois to impersonate the kind of woman others may want her to be: after all this was the author who insisted that it is by illusions that people live. But in playing a role, Lois becomes dimly aware of a buried life within her which seems humiliated by such gestures. Like Christopher Dysart, similarly situated in
The Real Charlotte,
she feels enough to know that she should feel more, knows enough to sense how little she really knows. She, also, is effete, with the added hopelessness that she recognizes such effeteness in herself. Caught in the open spaces between a role and a self, she finds a strange attraction in a house whose very architecture and furniture provides her with those stage directions which tell an actor how to perform: "I like to be in a pattern ... I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to
be
is so intransitive, so lonely".
¹⁷

Yet, there is in Lois a real scruple about such pattern and relation: her mind is too fine to be violated by a single idea. She may envy those who know exactly who they are, but she also fears such certainty. When she finds her path on the estate crossed by a rebel Irishman in a trenchcoat, she feels a weird mixture of envy and terror:

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry . . . She could not conceive of her country emotionally. . , His intentions burned on the dark an almost invisible trail; he might well have been a murderer he seemed so inspired.
¹⁸

The "lack" around which the house is structured is of a basic, animating principle: its members nervously rely on the mercy of rebels and on the efficiency of British soldiers to guarantee their own safety, yet they stand for nothing themselves. Lois is a good deal more compliant in these evasions than she would care to admit. When she overhears Mrs. Montmorency speaking of her in an adjoining room, she panics and rattles the bedroom utensils, so as not to hear the rest: "She didn't want to know what she was, she couldn't bear to: knowledge of this would stop, seal, finish one. Was she now to be clapped down under an adjective, to crawl round lifelong inside some quality like a fly in a tumbler".
¹⁹
All she hears, therefore, is "Lois is very – "; but what she
is,
she will never know.