The Love-Charm of Bombs (62 page)

Remarkably, Elizabeth remained secure in her belief in their love, even in the face of Charles's waning commitment. She found his marriage difficult. ‘My inability,' she wrote to him in October 1949, ‘though this only breaks out from time to time – to “take” the fact of your being married to someone else is a sort of deformity in me, like my stammer. Help me with it.' But, whatever cause for doubt Charles gave in person, or in his letters, she never lost faith in his love. ‘Our love is like something that we have given birth to,' she averred, in January 1950.

 

It has an independent existence of its own, outside temporary anguish and loneliness . . . Don't let us let anything, while we are apart, blunt our imagination and tenderness, even if these are sometimes a cause of pain. See me – I wish I were more beautiful – and feel me, even if it hurts . . . don't get a cold in your soul.

 

In May she asked if he really loved her as much as she loved him, only to answer her own question with an insistent ‘Yes, I think you do'.

Elizabeth overcame the sadness of their partings by maintaining that, though they were physically apart, there was an alternative world in which they were eternally together. She saw each of their letters as ‘a page or two of what's really a continuous one', stretching across the years. And she insisted that what they had was perpetuity, in which the breaks were merely shadows. ‘You are my eternity.' She consolidated this virtual realm by conjuring into being imaginary worlds. In October 1949 she visited a Nash castle near Bowen's Court which seemed to her ‘the perfect dwelling for two people who, in love, had deliberately decided to enter forever the world of hallucination, even at the risk of madness'. It was this world of hallucination that their letters provided for Elizabeth, and she sustained it by populating her imaginary world with literary versions of themselves.

Reading Nora Wydenbruck's biography of Rainer Maria Rilke in December 1949, Elizabeth told Charles that she felt certain that Rilke ‘would be your and my poet', suggesting that they should learn enough German to read him. She was sure that Rilke ‘could be a great strength and stay' to both of them. A month later, she sent the biography to Charles, acknowledging that it was funny to be so involved in a book about a poet whose work she did not know well, but finding the whole story and its outlook fascinating. ‘In a queer way,' she wrote, ‘something about the man and the story seems like a by-product of your and my experience.'

Wydenbruck's Rilke is a passionate, sensual, self-destructive man, who falls violently and often briefly in love with one woman after another but remains emotionally loyal throughout much of his adult life to a sustaining friendship with an older woman, the Princess Marie von Thurs und Taxis-Hohenlohe. Princess Marie has several obvious parallels with Elizabeth Bowen. She is brought up by remote parents who float into the nursery, festooned with roses. She has a powerful ‘feeling for words, for their substance and texture' and is well-known as a great storyteller. And, crucially, she spends much of her childhood in a dreamy Italian mansion called Sagrado, an enchanted castle in which, in Wydenbruck's account, ‘the lonely child dreamt her dreams and unconsciously absorbed the loveliness that was to form her spirit'. After the house was destroyed in the First World War, Princess Marie recalled childhood arrivals at Sagrado in a description that could come straight out of
Bowen's Court
:

 

I enter the hall, close my eyes and breathe the scent of Sagrado. It was a scent as of fresh flowers, mingling with a faint odour of dust, almost mildew, and a trace of wax with which the mosaic floors were polished – the smell of cool, shady rooms that have been shut up for a long time. And in the rooms and the closets, the vestibules and the corridors, in the halls and on the stairs I have met an invisible presence and heard its soft step, and I have felt it permeating the enchanted house – it was happiness.

 

In 1910 Rilke visited Princess Marie at her castle in Duino and the pair began an intense friendship that would continue until his death. Marie recalled the ‘precious hours' of this first visit as passing in undisturbed harmony. She was attracted by Rilke's unique charm and struck by his humility. He was a dual man, who combined ‘proud self-confidence' with the persona of ‘a delightful child', abandoned ‘to the dark phantoms of night' yet ‘open to tremendous visions'. She longed to remove ‘everything harsh and sad from his path'. Rilke was immediately drawn to the Princess, enjoying his ‘heartfelt' bond of understanding with her. During his next period of depression it was to her that he turned and, according to Wydenbruck, he now learnt the possibility of ordinary happiness through the offices of ‘a woman whose warmhearted, natural humanity was expressed in such perfected form that it no longer frightened or offended him'. Quickly, he began to write to the Princess almost every day: ‘spontaneous, natural letters which show how much he felt at home with her'. ‘How I wish', he wrote in one, ‘we could go for walks together here as we did in Venice, you would show me so many things and I would tell you about them.' These visits and letters set the tone for fifteen years of friendship and literary collaboration. Princess Marie became the most important reader of Rilke's work and the pair worked together on a translation of Dante's poems to Beatrice, reading these love poems aloud together in the evenings after listening to music in the afternoon.

In this aspect of their relationship, it is easy to see why Elizabeth Bowen was happy to identify herself and Charles with Princess Marie and Rilke. However, there is also an acceptance of limitation inherent in her identification. In Wydenbruck's account, Rilke's bond with Princess Marie was one of ‘intense sympathy', but it was not a love affair. There is no suggestion that it was ever sexual, and instead Rilke told Princess Marie about his love affairs with other women, showing her the letters he received from his beloveds. Wydenbruck commends the Princess for being ‘exceptionally free from the slight jealousy that attends most human friendships'; ‘big-hearted' in her desire to help Rilke in questions of love. However, it is not hard to read between the lines of the Princess's ‘big-hearted' descriptions of her friend and to glimpse her pain. ‘Will he never be left in peace,' she demanded in 1921; ‘will he never find the woman who loves him enough to understand what he needs – who would live only for him and not think about her own unimportant little life?' He had asked her over and over again whether she believed that ‘a loving being might exist somewhere, one who would be prepared to step back when the voice called to him'. He was seeking a woman who could ‘give her whole heart and never ask anything for herself'. Even if such a woman existed, Princess Marie asked herself rhetorically, ‘how should he find her?' For his part, Rilke failed to see that he had met her already, continuing instead merely to confide in the woman Wydenbruck describes as ‘his motherly friend'.

But Elizabeth, like Wydenbruck, could look beyond Rilke's limitations. While reading the biography, Elizabeth was also identifying with the Rilke of the poetry, merging the man and poet in Wydenbruck's title. In the poetry, Rilke is an ardent lover who commands his beloved to accept the pain that is commingled with the delight of love. ‘Let us not, in the dark sweet ecstasy, distinguish the direction of our tears. Are you certain whether we suffer delight, or shine from having drunk our fill of sorrow?' In the biography, there is an intensity even to his fickleness; a grandeur of feeling that allows him to remain lovable in his moments of depression, numbness and bleakness. This portrait of Rilke seems to have provided Elizabeth with a way to reconcile Charles's own limitations with her sense of him as a passionate lover.

Another crucial figure in Elizabeth's imaginary world was Gustave Flaubert, whose fervent love letters to Louise Colet expressed a longing equal to Elizabeth's own. ‘I look at your slippers, your handkerchief, your hair, your portrait, I reread your letters and breathe their musky perfume,' Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in much the same spirit that Elizabeth looked around and saw the corduroy armchair near the fire that Charles once sat in and collided with his ghost. At the same time, in his willingness to accept physical distance as a condition of the relationship, Flaubert resembled Charles. For Elizabeth, Flaubert's blending of passion and distance seems to have legitimised Charles's behaviour. In 1947, Bowen published a preface to a collection of Flaubert's work in which, two years after she had explained Charles as a ‘dual' man, torn between the intellectual and the imaginative realms, she saw Flaubert's temperament as breeding his art out of dualities. Here she asserts Louise Colet's power over Flaubert (‘He loved her, he loved his love for her, and he loved every evidence of her love'), and also details his failures as a lover. From Louise's point of view, ‘there were too many letters and too few meetings'; the raptures of Paris were interspersed with ‘lengthening months of nothing'. Although ultimately she does not defend Flaubert's part in the relationship, she suggests that it was no less important for him than for Louise. In Flaubert's life, Louise ‘had no successor'. If he hurt her more than she hurt him, ‘she entered his life more deeply than he entered hers. He never forgot, as he never repeated, love.'

During the 1950s, Elizabeth Bowen was preparing an edition of Flaubert's correspondence. This was never published, but she did get as far as compiling an extensive index and translating a handful of letters. Among these were letters to friends, describing the strain and joy of writing, and a few letters to Louise, written while Flaubert was working on
Madame Bovary
.
Here, after an exhausting day of writing, he sends Louise a ‘caress, a kiss, and all the thought left to me'. In one of the longest letters that Bowen translated, Flaubert admonishes Louise for her jealousy, maintaining that their love is too profound to fall at so petty a hurdle. So might Charles have replied to Elizabeth; her decision to translate it seems to contain an act of self-reproof, as well as an assertion of the passion possible in Charles's more detached position. ‘I wanted to love you', Flaubert announces grandly, ‘in a way that is not that of lovers.' Between them they could have ‘put all sex, all decency, all jealousy, all politeness under our feet, low down, to make us a pedestal; so standing we could together have towered above ourselves'. This love ‘would have been the whole heart'.

Writing to Charles in 1960, Elizabeth made explicit the identification she had created, since the 1940s, between Flaubert and both herself and Charles. Here, delighted that Charles was reading the Flaubert letters, she described the ‘extraordinary feeling one has towards him' as the ‘feeling of identification one has in love'. For her, he captured accurately the sensation she herself had in writing, with its feeling that everything else was unreal. She would not have been able to love anyone without ‘the Flaubertian quality about them' and Charles, of course, had it himself. Flaubert was one of the people she most wished she had known, but there was a way in which she did in fact know him. Indeed, once late at night in the library at Bowen's Court, working away at the writing table by the window, she thought ‘he was away off behind my back, sitting in one of those corduroy chairs by the fire'. Picturing him in that same chair in which she had so often pictured Charles, she felt a ‘frisson' in her spine. When she finally turned round and he was not there, ‘with his beautiful heavy fair moustache', she was disappointed. In 1946, in daylight, Elizabeth had come down the flight of stairs in the hall and thought she saw someone standing outside the front door. Certain that it would be Charles, she saw the clothes he would be wearing, his attitude, the expression on his face. Opening the door, she found that there was nobody there. There is an intense actuality to Elizabeth's fantasies that suggests she came close to entering that ‘world of hallucination, even at the risk of madness' that she had imagined the lovers crossing into in the Nash castle. It was a world that gained veracity through containing not just herself and Charles but Flaubert and Rilke, incorporating the imaginative worlds of their writing.

Meanwhile, in the day-to-day world that Elizabeth shared with her husband, Alan's health and drinking were getting considerably worse. In May 1949 Elizabeth wrote to Charles that Alan had come back to Ireland from London ‘rather ill again: more of that wretched heart-trouble'. He was wandering around in a sort of dream; ‘deprived of his cat, he is now falling in love with trees, the trees here'. One day, gazing at the trees, he wrung her heart by saying suddenly, ‘Do you realise these are being the happiest months of my life?'

Over the next two years, Alan's health deteriorated rapidly. He suffered a heart attack in 1951, and in January 1952 he retired from his job at EMI and Elizabeth and Alan gave up Clarence Terrace, moving permanently to Bowen's Court. On 26 August, Alan died. It was a quiet death; the sun shone, and the Catholic neighbours came to pray beside his coffin. Elizabeth spent the next few months overwhelmed by grief. Writing to William Plomer on 9 September, she described how reading Plomer's memoir had saved what had otherwise been ‘terrifyingly empty days'. More openly, in a letter to Isaiah Berlin in October, written on a depressing autumn afternoon with leaves drifting diagonally past her window, Elizabeth wrote that she had been living in a ‘queer state of isolation'. ‘I never had, till now,' she explained, ‘known what it was to mourn. I have felt sorrows, but those are so unlike the state of grief – which is, I find, almost like a state in the geographic sense, with a climate and landscape of its own.' Elizabeth was acutely aware of how much she had lost with Alan's death. He was, she told Berlin, ‘not only the anchorage of my life but also the sort of assurance of moral good in it'; he embodied the principle of ‘good sense'.