The Love-Charm of Bombs (17 page)

Born only a few months and a few miles apart, Elizabeth and Sean were nonetheless enemies by birth. For centuries, his Catholic, Republican ancestors had hated the Protestant landed gentry who inhabited Bowen's Court. May Sarton later recalled how Elizabeth ‘at one time suffered from the taunts of one man she loved who was Irish; there was never, there could not be, a perfect equilibrium after centuries of such hatred on one side and condescension on the other'. For Sean's daughter, the novelist Julia O'Faolain, who was a small child during the affair, this was sex ‘as synecdoche': the coming together of two Irelands; the fiery liaison of the daughter of the Big House with the man who burned such houses down. Years later Elizabeth recollected Sean watching her as she locked up Bowen's Court for the night, heaving an iron bar into place and fastening the hall door with chains. ‘
Here
,' he told her, ‘was a Big House ready for a siege!' Simultaneously, they were stirred by complex race memories; she was aware that her own first Irish ancestor had come from Wales, while Sean was descended from the ancient inhabitants of the land.

 

Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O'Faolain at Bowen's Court,
c
. 1938

 

But Elizabeth discovered a new side of Ireland through Sean. As a child in Dublin, Elizabeth had been oblivious to the Irish revival that was going on around her. For her Irish contemporaries, this was the era when W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, revived Celtic art and translated Celtic fairy stories. But Elizabeth Bowen recorded in
Bowen's Court
that ‘so complete was my parents' immunity from the Irish Revival that
I
only heard of this for the first time when I was at school in England, about 1916'. Since then, she had read her way through the new Irish canon and met Yeats at a dinner given by her friend Maurice Bowra. But it was through Sean that she had direct access to the movement, and was introduced to Yeats in a domestic setting. ‘I met some of the grand old boys,' Elizabeth reported to William Plomer in 1938; ‘like Yeats, with whom I spent an evening, who was an angel, in his own house, less showy and more mellow: he has a superb white cat.' In his autobiography, Sean O'Faolain recalled that Elizabeth made such a hit with the ageing poet that Yeats's wife kept imploring Sean not to take her away: ‘He likes her! He likes her!' Sean also introduced Elizabeth to his contemporaries. Frank O'Connor came to stay at Bowen's Court where she described him chanting in the library, ‘dropping his head back as did Yeats', recalling ‘the magnificence of the Midnight Court, poetry and bawdry of an Ireland before the potato had struck root'.

Sean increased Elizabeth's political range, enlisting her sympathy for the Republican rebels. As far as he was concerned,
The Last September
was extremely successful as a portrait of dreamy girlhood and countryside. He had no hesitation in judging it Elizabeth Bowen's ‘loveliest novel', and later misremembered this as the novel that had caused him to fall in love in advance of meeting her. In fact, when he first courted her, he had no idea that she had written an Irish novel, and he read it in April 1937, just before going to stay with her at Bowen's Court. Finishing it at breakfast (‘an unfair test'), he wrote her an ecstatic letter of congratulation, commending it as ‘entirely Irish – if that matters a damn' (and for Sean O'Faolain, of course, it did). He could smell the hay; he adored the ‘un-underlined atmosphere'; but he was longing for ‘the “enemy” to come into the foreground a bit'. Sean, who was happy to identify with the romantic, dangerous figure in the trench coat, wanted Peter Connor to come upon Lois in the dark shrubbery. He later characterised Elizabeth Bowen's standard plot as the encounter between ‘the kid and the cad'. Now, asking her if ‘the wall between Danielstown and Peter Connor's farm' could be scaled, he was prepared to be the cad for the coltish girl he persistently regarded Elizabeth herself to be.

Sean swaggered into Elizabeth's life with all the charismatic eloquence of his hero, Daniel O'Connell, whose biography he was then writing, and insisted that she look the rebel straight in the eye. The encounter was exhilarating, painful and enlightening. Together, Sean and Elizabeth could chip away at the wall between the Big House and the Republican's farm, and Elizabeth could find a way to engage authentically with the other side of the struggle, interrogating the credentials of her Anglo-Irish ancestors. The result was
Bowen's Court
, a book that would be published in the middle of the war in 1942, but which she was already researching in 1938 and writing, in Sean's presence, in the summer of 1939. Sean himself is perhaps most romantically acknowledged here in her portrait of Daniel O'Connell, whose ‘eloquence was to rush through remote and downtrodden Ireland like an incoming tide, filling dead reaches, lifting the people, carrying them'.

Bowen's Court
is the history of Elizabeth Bowen's own house, set in the context of five hundred years of Irish history. It is both an attack on an imperialist power and a defence of a dying way of life. Bowen is clear in apportioning blame to the English for most of the bloodier aspects of Irish history. In the seventeenth century, ‘the chivalric element disappeared from the struggle' between the English and the Irish. ‘The complete subjugation and the exploitation of Ireland became the object of the English burgess class.' The Union of 1800 which brought together British and Irish church and state was, she states unequivocally, ‘a bad deal'; ‘a tragedy that puts uninformed comment quite out of countenance'.

But Bowen is equally clear in maintaining that the Anglo-Irish should not be taken for English and blamed accordingly. For the Union to take place, prominent Anglo-Irish ‘were bought, to their lasting dishonour, by peerages, by advancements in the peerage, and by sums down'. They were attracted, masochistically, by the English, but Bowen insists that this attraction was ‘too unwilling to be love'. And the Bowens themselves, for all their faults, had an ethic of ‘politeness to England, rather than loyalty'. They lived on good terms with their Irish neighbours and, although it would be presumptuous to say that they were popular, their hardnesses were pardoned and their vagaries suffered. She never heard (‘why should I?') any remark about ‘the Irish' prompted either by panic or by the wish to insult. The Anglo-Irish may not have done much but, for centuries, ‘we did believe we did something: we lived well, we circulated our money, we, consciously or unconsciously, set out to give life an ideal mould'.

Elizabeth Bowen's affair with Sean O'Faolain was curtailed by war. From the start, it was evident to her that if and when war broke out between Britain and Germany, her place would be with her husband in London. During the Munich crisis in September 1938, Alan summoned Elizabeth to Clarence Terrace on what turned out to be a false alarm. On 30 September, she reported to Isaiah Berlin that Alan had telephoned her two days earlier, suggesting that she should cross that night to cope with aspects of the National Emergency in London. Crisis had been followed by anticlimax; she had done nothing but eat figs, read the ARP handbook and try on her gas mask. Feeling that more time in Ireland was owing, she arranged to return to collect some belongings and see friends in Dublin; she was not ready to leave Sean. Thankfully, the crisis was averted, and over the course of the next year Elizabeth spent much of her time in Ireland, meeting Sean fairly frequently in Cork and Dublin. He also visited her in London. In January 1939, Elizabeth wrote to ask Virginia Woolf if she had time to see a friend of hers from Ireland, who ‘wants to meet you so very much'. Virginia wrote back offering tea to Elizabeth and ‘the man with the Irish name' (‘I've never read him, but am sure he's nice'). Later Sean recollected the sight of the profiles of the two women – ‘Virginia's exquisitely, delicately beautiful, Elizabeth's not beautiful but handsome and stately' – bent over a ring-casket Virginia Woolf had inherited from Ottoline Morrell.

Sean's final visit to Elizabeth's house in Clarence Terrace took place on 31 August 1939, the day before Germany invaded Poland. In his autobiography, Sean O'Faolain recalled how, as they ‘lay-abed, passion-sated', Alan rang from the office to tell Elizabeth that the British fleet had been ordered to mobilise, ‘which means war'. Elizabeth thanked her husband unemotionally; awkwardly, Sean made a joke; Elizabeth replied, dryly unforgiving, that this sort of tasteless humour ‘
is
the sort of thing that war “does to people”, isn't it'. In a 1940 account of a journey around Ireland made during this period Sean O'Faolain rewrote the event altogether, claiming more heroically that he was in fact at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain in Mayo, a traditional site of Irish pilgrimage, on the day that war was declared.

In October 1939, Sean made one final visit to Bowen's Court, where he found Elizabeth trying to haul the house into the twentieth century – getting a telephone put in, and having the house wired for electricity. It was clear that this was the end of the relationship; Elizabeth was about to decamp more permanently to London. After casting herself in the enjoyable role of the feisty
cailín
of a Republican gunman she was ready to identify herself as the loyal wife of an English civil servant. To an extent, Sean envied Elizabeth her role in the war. While staying at Bowen's Court, he wrote an article entitled ‘Irish Blackout' for the
Manchester Guardian
, where he described the anxious atmosphere in the Irish countryside: ‘Tradition has been broken. The heart is dishevelled. Continuity has been blotted out.' He was deafened by the ‘silence from across Europe', blinded by the ‘total darkness of the mind'. ‘We sit wondering what it must be like in London, Berlin, Warsaw, conjuring furnace towns, flying men, and complaining beasts.' A year later, Elizabeth Bowen would write in her short story ‘Summer Night' that ‘in the heart of the neutral Irishman indirect suffering pulled like a crooked knife'.

The affair was officially over. However, Bowen listed O'Faolain among five other friends and relatives she had met in Dublin in her first report to the British government in July 1940. It is possible that it was more than a cursory meeting; that her letter to Woolf was disingenuous and her decision to visit wartime Ireland was the result of more than just a sense of political duty. Either way, she remained sufficiently in touch with O'Faolain for him to publish an article by her on ‘The Big House' in the first issue of
The Bell
, Ireland's new literary magazine, which he edited throughout the war.

This article of October 1940 comes out of the writing of
Bowen's Court
and reveals Bowen thinking urgently about the role of the Big House in contemporary Ireland. In his letter about
The Last September
O'Faolain told Bowen that she should write about a Danielstown Big House ‘that was at least aware of the Ireland outside'; ‘that, perhaps, regretted the division enough to admit it was there'. Bowen's article is an attempt to explain the Big House to those on the outside of its walls; to protest that it is not as isolated as it seems (‘one's own point of departure always seems to one normal') and to elucidate its appeal – the ‘peculiar spell' cast by the dead who lived there and pursued the same routine within the house and now provide ‘a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and every hour'.

Rather than defending the privilege of the inhabitants, Bowen assumes that everyone now knows ‘that life is not all jam in the big house'. Expensive sacrifices must be made and ‘new democratic Ireland no longer denounces the big house, but seems to marvel at it. Why fight to maintain life in a draughty barrack?' From amid the bombs in London, Bowen asks herself the same question. Can the Big House justify its existence and the sacrifices that must be made on its behalf in a time of war? The answer is that it can; that the social discipline – the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal – is now more relevant than ever. And, even with the bolts and chains that O'Faolain saw as preparing the way for a siege, the Big House is not designed to exclude but to bring together. The big rooms demand that we ‘scrap the past, with its bitternesses and barriers, and all meet, throwing in what we have'; the doors, which stand open all day and are only regretfully barred up at night, welcome the stranger, just as much as the friend.

In Ireland in November 1940, a month after he had published her article, Sean took Elizabeth out for a final lunch. They went to Jammet's, Dublin's best restaurant. Before the war, Virginia Woolf had visited Dublin and despaired at the impossibility of cultural revolution ‘when the best restaurant in the capital is Jammet's, when there's only boiled potatoes in the biggest hotel in Dublin'. Now, the food at Jammet's seemed positively opulent in contrast with the wartime rationing that had affected even London's grandest establishments. Elizabeth later recalled how during the war British journalists, happy to arrive in Dublin, headed on arrival straight to Ireland's finest restaurants, first to eat, then to type ‘gargantuan stories of Irish eating' for the papers represented.