The Love-Charm of Bombs (29 page)

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 voice 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'.

However, Bowen complicates the divide between Britain and Ireland by suggesting that involvement in the war does not necessarily entail emotional engagement. It is not enough simply to be aware of the war, and reality may reside in the fields of Cork as much as in the bombed streets of London. Where initially it seems that the Anglo-Irish are living in an anaesthetised detachment while Henry is engaging with destruction and pain, it becomes clear that he in fact is the anaesthetised one. Under the influence of the beauty of the setting and of his hostess, an older woman he loved from a distance in his youth, Henry comes to protest at returning to ‘the zone of death'.

 

The moment he had been dreading, returning desire, flooded him in this tunnel of avenue . . . He thought, with nothing left but our brute courage, we shall be nothing but brutes.

 

Politically, this is a complex story. If, as she had hoped in her letter to Virginia Woolf, Bowen did do some good in Ireland, it was because she insisted throughout the war on the intricacy of the Irish situation, and of the relationship between the English and the Irish. O'Faolain saw Bowen's Ministry of Information reports as a betrayal of herself and of Ireland. In fact, from the start she saw this as something she was doing as much for the sake of Ireland as for England. She hoped to explain the nuances – the dementing intransigence – of each to the other, and her appearances in
The Bell
provided her with a public voice in Ireland with which to do this. She was convinced by her own, modest success. In her 12 July report to the Ministry, Bowen urged the British government to grant more travel permits to responsible and intelligent Irish people, in genuine sympathy with the Allied war effort, who ‘could do untold good over here'. ‘I think I have stressed,' she added, ‘in all my Reports, the immense importance in this country, of personal impressions and personal talk.'

An opportunity for talk was provided by her interview with the Irish writer Larry Morrow, who was known in
The Bell
as the anonymous ‘Bellman'. This took place during her summer visit and was printed in the September issue of the magazine
.
They met at the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green, which was Elizabeth Bowen's favourite hotel in Dublin (she would later write a book about it) and was just along the Green from her Dublin flat. Although this was an interview of Bowen by Morrow, the talk went in both directions. Morrow was struck by what he saw as the ‘aristocrat's capacity' for ‘impressing one with sudden and surprising degrees of solicitude for her listener's physical, spiritual and intellectual welfare'. Bowen had questioned the questioner, presumably partly in the service of her Ministry of Information reports.

Bowen used the interview as a chance to prove her own Irish credentials. She enthused lyrically about Cork. ‘If Elizabeth Bowen has any regrets in her life,' Morrow informed his readers, ‘which one doubts – it is that, in all other respects a Corkwoman, she was born in the city of Dublin . . . “I'm
frightfully
proud of Cork”, she will tell you, screwing up her eyes . . . “Ever since I saw Cork, as a small girl, I have regarded it as my capital city.” ' And she presented herself matter-of-factly as an Irish novelist. ‘As long as I can remember I've been extremely conscious of being Irish – even when I was writing about such very un-Irish things as suburban life in Paris or the English seaside.'