The Love-Charm of Bombs (46 page)

Charles visited Bowen's Court in November, and Elizabeth was able to sustain herself with memories once again, insisting that he should do likewise. ‘Your beloved letter came on Tuesday. How near each other we are. How deeply I love you: this is such a joy, such a joy we share.' ‘Love isn't really an illusion,' she told him, addressing his doubts on his own terms, ‘it's a reality. As far as I'm concerned, it's you.' For her part, she had lived with him every moment since his departure, and did not feel lonely. Her certainty lasted through into December – ‘the feeling of closeness I've had to you here, day and night, since you left has been extraordinary' – though she missed him constantly, and longed to see him again. In December she left for London, and as always she hated shutting up the house in which the continuous daydream of their love could unfold so easily. ‘Every time I have to do it I feel as though something died in me – or even as though I became a degree less virtuous.' She was always fearful that she would die in England and not come back.

All this time she was struggling with
The Heat of the Day
. ‘Any novel I have ever written has been difficult to write and this is being far the most difficult of all,' she wrote to Charles in March 1945. ‘The thing revolves round and round in my brain . . . Almost anything that happens around me contributes to it.' A year later she was back at the novel, grappling with its technical and psychological challenges but finding it absorbing and cheering. That May she was caught up in the ‘most cryptic part of my novel – heavens, it is difficult to write. I discard every page, rewrite it and throw discarded sheets of conversation about the floor. Is everything you do as difficult as that? I imagine so. From rubbing my forehead I have worn an enormous hole in it, which bleeds.' This bleeding wound was the price she paid for her dual life: for the intense fulfilment provided by her shared imaginary existence with Charles, which through willpower alone she kept at every moment from subsiding into anguished longing. But of course the longing was always there, pricking away from below the surface of her defiant happiness, and emerging, bloody and tangible in the wound on her head.

Finally, by December 1947, Bowen was halfway through the last chapter of her novel. Her life was lived round the edges of writing; she was working for eight hours a day, returning to the novel after supper in the evenings. Charles had read parts of it and reported that he felt a new growth and strength in her writing. ‘If that is so', she replied, ‘and I think it is, you know that has come to me from you, don't you? You've given me not only greater comprehension but clearer vision than I had, and made me more fearless. I feel this in my life: it would be strange if it didn't show at least to some extent in my writing.'

The Heat of the Day
had taken five difficult years to write and Bowen had come a long way from the hallucinatory descriptions of wartime love of the opening chapters, written in the early days with Charles. The second half of the novel is dominated by suspicion, doubt and betrayal, as Stella confronts the growing certainty that Robert is, as Harrison has alleged, a spy handing over British war secrets to Nazi Germany.

Wearing away at that bleeding wound in her forehead, Bowen was attempting to write a novel in which the romantic hero has voluntarily and unnecessarily gone over to the German side. The Nazis themselves are never named, but are still present as a hinterland of the novel; an evil melodramatically lurking in the background. For Bowen's English readers it was shocking to make Robert a Nazi sympathiser in a novel published only a few years after the war had ended and the worst crimes of the Nazis had been revealed. Rosamond Lehmann, writing Elizabeth an ecstatic letter praising the novel, wondered if she could have made Robert a Communist instead of a Nazi, which would have made it more palatable.

 

What bothers me a little is that I cannot see why he shouldn't have been a Communist and therefore pro-Russia and pro-Ally, rather than pro-‘enemy'.

 

The answer is that for Bowen, as an Irishwoman, the possibility of supporting Germany was less unthinkable than it seemed to British readers. She wrote the scenes in which Robert explains his defection from the point of view of someone who had toyed with assuming an English identity and had come down firmly on the side of the Irish. ‘Selfishly speaking I'd much rather live my life here,' she wrote to William Plomer from Bowen's Court in September 1945.

 

I've been coming gradually unstuck from England for a long time. I have adored England since 1940 because of the stylishness Mr Churchill gave it, but I've always felt, ‘when Mr Churchill goes, I go'. I can't stick all these little middle-class Labour wets with their Old London School of Economics ties and their women. Scratch any of these cuties and you find the governess. Or so I have always found.

 

For the Irish, Robert's politics were less unusual than they seemed to the English. Throughout his poetry, Yeats had bemoaned the ‘new commonness / Upon the throne and crying about the streets', asking for Irish heroes who would rise above the masses and cleanse their nation through force. ‘What's equality?' he asked in a ‘Marching Song' published in the
Spectator
in 1934; ‘Muck in the yard'.

 

Historic Nations grow

From above to below.

 

In Yeats's late poem and personal epitaph ‘Under Ben Bulben' Irish poets are invited to learn their trade by scorning:

 

the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top . . .

Base-born products of base beds

 

and embracing instead the completion offered by violence. Here Yeats quotes approvingly the nationalist
Jail Journal
of the nineteenth-century activist John Mitchel: ‘Send war in our time, O Lord!' And in Ireland, there had been open pro-Nazi sympathisers throughout the war, albeit not as many as some British propagandists would have people believe. That very Irish Irishman, Francis Stuart, used rhetoric not dissimilar to Robert's in the radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany that Bowen would have been exposed to during her wartime fact-finding trips to Ireland. In one broadcast, Stuart explained his motivation for going to Germany on the grounds that ‘like I daresay a good many others of us, I was heartily sick and disgusted with the old order under which we've been existing . . . If there had to be a war then I wanted to be among those people who had also had enough of the old system and who moreover claimed that they had a new and better one.'

A decade earlier, in a memoir written in the early 1930s, Stuart railed against democracy itself as ‘the ideal of those whose lives as individuals are failures and who, feeling their own futility, take refuge in the mass and become arrogant in the herd'. In the climactic scene of
The Heat of the Day
, Robert echoes Stuart in his insistence that Britain has already ‘sold itself out'; that freedom is merely freedom for ‘the muddled, mediocre, damned'.

 

Look at your mass of ‘free' suckers, your democracy – kidded along from the cradle to the grave . . . Do you suppose there's a single man of mind who doesn't realise
he
only begins where his freedom stops? One in a thousand may have what to be free takes – if so, he has what it takes to be something better, and he knows it: who could want to be free when he could be strong?

 

Bowen herself expressed views not dissimilar to Francis Stuart's or Robert's in her disappointment about the election results. Though she was prepared to accept that a few of the new Labour leaders and their supporters were ‘All Right' (possessed of principles ‘one may not share but can admire'), she saw them as surrounded by an ‘awful entourage of the sissy, the half-baked, the manqués, the people with the chips on their shoulder, the people who've never made any grade and are convinced that it must be the grade's fault'. These are the people Robert describes as muddled, mediocre and damned; they could be Stuart's failures, taking refuge in the herd, or Yeats's base-born products of base beds.

Robert's sense that his country has betrayed him and therefore he must now betray it in its turn is related to Bowen's own sense, at the end of the war, that democracy had failed and that power was in the hands of the weak. Of course Bowen's sentiments were excessive, and Robert's are too; this is because they are filtered through the intensity of love. If the extremity of her distress at the weakness she found in post-war England was the result of her anguish at Charles's departure and her fear that their love too would fail to make the grade, then perhaps Bowen created Robert as a would-be strong man in order to test and to challenge Charles's strength. Another answer to Rosamond Lehmann's objection is that it is a novel about betrayal, and the betrayal needs to be ballasted by the full force of Nazi evil if we are to accept it as tragic. It is a political novel, but the politics are part of the love story, just as Elizabeth Bowen's own political disillusionment was imbued with the strength of her anguished longing for Charles.

The dedication of the novel to Charles Ritchie was double-edged: both a compliment and a warning. The book contains the loving, romanticised portrait that Charles hoped to find when Elizabeth was first planning it in 1942. Those early chapters that she wrote during the war are a celebration of the act of falling in love and of surrendering one's selfhood into someone else's keeping. ‘How extraordinarily that is your and my book,' she wrote to him shortly before its publication; ‘Short of there having been a child there could be no other thing that was more you and me.' But, ultimately, it is a book about a love that is destined to implode. During those years when she was constantly assuring Charles of the reality and eternity of their shared love, Elizabeth Bowen was writing about a love affair destroyed by a lack of faith on one side and an obsessive, sacrificial will-to-power on the other. Rereading the novel after Elizabeth's death, Charles found that it was filled for him ‘with echoes, reflections (as from a mirror, or a mirror-lined room). Also of premonitions, backward questionings, unanswered, and now unanswerable guesses. It is the story of our love, with a flaw in it, or did she feel a flaw in me?'

In the end, the love story itself is briefly redeemed. During their final confrontation, Stella turns Robert's photograph to the wall, in order to try to picture life without him. Gazing at the blank white back of the mount, Stella is shaken by returning love. She has to hold on to the chimney piece while she steadies her body ‘against the beating of her heart – so violent that it seemed to begin again with cruel accumulated force'. She tries to call out to Robert, but has no voice; he appears anyway, thinking he has heard her cry; at once, they are ‘in each other's arms'. Although Stella has seen the full extent of the flaw, she remains loyal to her lover. But it is too late: he goes up onto her roof and dies. Whether he dies intentionally or unintentionally, it is possible that with more faith he could have been saved. She could have confided in him earlier; he could have confided in her. He could have chosen to put love before power, or before the peculiar, almost religious self-righteousness of his politics.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Robert has sacrificed their love for a higher ideal. He realises belatedly that the sacrifice was not worth it. ‘What do you suppose I thought in my mother's house?' he asks Stella, explaining why he came back to visit her, even though he knew it was dangerous; ‘that I'd never be in your arms again. What do you suppose I had to make sure of? That. That, then to tell you.' In this respect, the novel is not so much a lament for a love that has failed as a warning about the tragedy of a love that is wilfully destroyed. In the end, they are left with a lifelong might-have-been. ‘Better', says Robert, ‘to say goodbye at the beginning of the hour we never have had, then it will have no end – best of all, Stella, if you can come to remember what never happened, to live most in the one hour we never had.' As far as Elizabeth Bowen herself was concerned, the might-have-been, though moving as melodrama, was tragically wasteful. In the letter she wrote to Charles while she was finishing the novel, Elizabeth pleaded with him to ‘somehow, some place in the not too far distant future let me see your beloved face'. ‘Love is a life,' she urged, ‘and a life does cry out to be lived.'
The Heat of the Day
is in part a plea for love and life; for a love accepted and a life lived.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 16

17

‘Flying, no, leaping, into the centre of the mainland'

Hilde Spiel's return to Vienna, 1946

 

In January 1946, Hilde Spiel went back to Vienna. She had been longing to go since the end of the war. On a brief visit to London after VE Day, Peter had brought her a branch of jasmine from the Mirabell park in Salzburg which brought tears to her eyes. After the death of her father her homesickness became stronger than ever. It was time to go home.

Hilde had spent the autumn of 1945 envying Peter's excitement at his life on the Continent, where history was being made and the future of Europe was being worked out. She now wanted to be there too, although she was reluctant to give up her hard-won Englishness. In November she met the French novelist and Resistance hero André Chamson, who had recently arrived in London. He complained about the English, and specifically about their indifference to sex and pretty women. Although she was inclined to agree with Chamson, Hilde now realised how glad she was to have been accepted in the English world. She thought that there was a nobility in English reticence which Chamson had missed. And she told Peter that she had no doubt where civilisation had reached its peak.