ELIZABETH BOWEN The Enforced Return. By Neil Corcoran. 211 pp. Oxford University Press. $74.
ELIZABETH BOWEN is a great writer. To this sentence is usually appended a phrase like: "though widely underappreciated" or "though not much read" or "of the Anglo-Irish experience between the wars." These are the sorts of phrases that give the impression that Bowen must be read through a special instrument, such as a telescope. In fact, the opposite is true. Bowen, the author of some 28 books, who lived from 1899 to 1973, had a genius for conveying the reader straight into the most powerful and complex regions of the heart. On that terrain, she was bold, empathic and merciless. She wrote about the aftermath of wars, about affairs and about childhood with equally piercing insight and a thorough comprehension of the consequences of politics and desire. If Bowen is not read now as widely as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, to whom she is often compared, it may be not because of her hyphen (since the specific concerns of the Anglo-Irish are not so widely understood these days), or the intricacy of her style. It may be, instead, that it is difficult to read a writer who bears down so hard on intimacy -- among not only men and women, but men and women and their country, their houses, their pasts and themselves -- and with an overwhelming, Irish sense of a bottomless, ancient pool of loss. She is as ruthless as James, as stylistically uncanny as Woolf, but with an ineradicable sense that history is made of other people's dirt. In photos, Bowen is impeccably ladylike, with a long upper-class face. But in her work, she's not reserved and her concerns do not seem quaint; she ventures unbearably close to ruins and wreckage, offering as consolation only an aesthetics of the haunted. Without ever writing anything that could be described as explicit, Bowen is raw.
Appreciations of Bowen tend to arise in distant glimpses, like the film version of her novel "The Last September," released in 2000. Victoria Glendinning's biography, published in 1978, offered a longer, though disappointingly timid, look at Bowen's privileged, complicated life. (Glendinning spends so many huffy pages explaining away the obviously Sapphic currents in Bowen's life that the explanations begin to seem like a Monty Python routine.) The latest glimpse into Bowen's work is Neil Corcoran's insightful, slender "Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return." As the colon suggests, this is an academic study -- the word "aporia" will be used -- but Corcoran is also a fan, hooked since his teens, who speaks passionately of "my own Elizabeth Bowen." A professor of English at the University of Liverpool, he is eloquent throughout on two of the strongest strains in Bowen's work: her hauntedness, and what he calls "the gift or pain or dislocation of living between Ireland and England, of being bilocated." Bowen was, indeed, a great cartographer of the in-between, not only nationally but in the seemingly smallest internal moments and interactions between characters. "Only dispossessed people," she wrote, "know their land in the dark." For "land" read: everything most beloved. It was as if Bowen had a sixth sense for the ambiguous, the irresolvable and the fractured, whether in the form of a fleeting emotion, an impossible love, a memory or an entire nation.
This sixth sense was probably the only part of her heritage Bowen ever got to keep. The Anglo-Irish of Bowen's time were a vexed caste. Originally installed by Cromwell to help subjugate Ireland, over several centuries they became an increasingly uneasy, floating, semi-ethnicity, neither English nor Irish, most at home, as Bowen wrote, when crossing the Irish Sea. Bowen grew up on her family's Irish estate, Bowen's Court, family property since 1653. But her life appears to have been a series of losses of this already ambiguous status: the Easter Rising of 1916 that swept Ireland also began to sweep away many of the Anglo-Irish, literally burning many of the great houses to the ground; this was aggravated by the two world wars; in 1959, unable to afford it, Bowen was forced to sell Bowen's Court. Bowen's mother died when Bowen was 13; her father was mentally unstable. It is a strange thing to grieve over the ruins of not one but two countries while never having felt entirely part of either, but this was Bowen's fate and, as Corcoran argues, the engine of much of her work. She is one of the few writers, he notes, to make use of the idea of the "living ghost" -- that is, a ghost that appears in one place while the living person is still walking around in another. It's a beautifully condensed image of many things, not least of which is the novel itself.
Corcoran groups Bowen's work thematically into "Ireland," "Children" and "War." Bowen can indeed be read this way, beginning with her memoir, "Bowen's Court" (1942), and her delicate early novel of the Irish uprising, "The Last September" (1929). It's also possible to go straight to the center of Bowen's emotional forest by beginning with "The House in Paris" (1935) and "The Death of the Heart" (1938). A. S. Byatt has said that "The House in Paris" is Bowen's best novel, "one of those books that grow in the mind, in time." It is also a book about the growth of the mind in time. Two children cross paths in this house. One of them, Leopold, is waiting for his mother, who does not arrive. That, in a sense, is all that happens, except that the reason she doesn't arrive encompasses Leopold's paternity, and the nature of passion, and deaths both literal and of the soul, and everything that divides the knowledge of children from the knowledge of adults. It is tragic, exquisite and told in strange and exact sentences that only Bowen could write. Of one bitter character: "Caring for nothing, she seemed to keep every happening, like rows of sea-blunted pebbles with no character, in her lit-up mind."
In "The Death of the Heart," Bowen's most popular novel, Portia, who is 16, is inducted into the entanglements of adults, but by means of her own wayward desire for the devilish Eddie, who is "like a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang." In "A World of Love," 20-year-old Jane unmasks the family's most sacred ghost, a soldier who died young and is the secret passion of nearly every woman in the house, each of whom believes he loved her best. These three novels are the warmest and the most painful in Bowen's oeuvre. Each builds a complex, interlocking emotional world, only to pull the trigger at exactly the inevitable moment that produces the most wreckage. It is as if she absorbed from the events that prompted "The Last September" the message that tenuous but highly sophisticated civilizations can fall, seemingly in an instant, and applied that knowledge to the smaller but no less dense civilizations of various inner worlds. These, too, fall in Bowen, with great reverberations.
There is also the very early, preternaturally sensitive Bowen of "The Hotel" (1927) and the later, impossibly snarled Bowen of "Eva Trout" (1969) -- attempt it at your own risk -- as well as the wealth of her short stories, essays and memoirs. Her fiction concerning wartime and its aftermath, such as the short story "Mysterious Kor," is particularly fine; describing the suspended quality of a civilization under siege suited Bowen's talent for navigating the riptides of indeterminacy. Corcoran argues that Bowen belongs in the canon. He's right. But it would be too bad if a writer whose particular talent was for life's most fluid, multiple qualities were merely canonized. A writer this alive should be read.
Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels "Tea" and "A Seahorse Year."
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