IT appears to have become a serious offence in Ireland to say that Elizabeth Bowen was an English writer, as John Boland did in this newspaper earlier this year. Perhaps a time will come in Burma when it will give offence to describe George Orwell as an English writer, but it shows no sign of coming yet. Nor do the Indians take offence when Kipling is described as an English writer. And, in a somewhat different context, the Poles live easily with the fact that Conrad is generally treated as an English novelist.
The Duke of Wellington killed off the notion that he might be a Irishman by saying that if he had been born in a stable that would not have made him a horse. His immense scorn, flowing down through the generations, ensured that no West British pedant or sycophant ever described him as Ireland's greatest general. And the steely eye of Lord Kitchener was equally discouraging of such levity.
But was Wellington any less Irish than Elizabeth Bowen? Although he role-played the English gentleman, he had neither precursor nor successor in the flair which he brought to bear on English military affairs.And the same might be said in the literary sphere of Sterne, Goldsmith and Wilde. But Elizabeth Bowen is very much a hot-house product of the rarefied, upper-middle-class circles in the Home Counties.
One finds something of Burma in Orwell and one finds quite a bit of India in Kipling, but what of Ireland does one find in Bowen? An occasional castle in Ireland that might just as well be a castle in Spain for all the bearing it has on the activity of Irish life.Victoria Glendinning, Bowen's major biographer, introducing a group of stories being re-published under the title "Irish Stories", says circumspectly: "Two things are surprising about Elizabeth's Irish short stories [that is, her stories set in Ireland] - first, that there are not more of them, and second, that they come so late." These stories are very much "set in Ireland" rather than Irish in any social or cultural sense. Her most Irish story is the novel, The Last September, published in the 1920s. It is set in the last September of her Ireland - Cromwellian/Williamite Ireland - Anglo-Ireland - the Ireland of the English state which had recently lost a general election and was trying to hang on by force.
And after that last September Bowen's Ireland was no more. John Hume likes to see Ireland as people rather than as a piece of land, but Bowen's Ireland after 1921 was strictly a piece of land. The people who shrugged off the Cromwellian/Williamite overlay, which constituted her Ireland, were alien to her. She was born in an English projection into Ireland. After the English state was compelled to withdraw from southern Ireland she stayed mostly at home in the Home Counties until 1940.
A sympathetic English biographer, Patricia Craig, was taken aback by the tenacious apartheid of "Protestant professional Dublin" into which Bowen was born: "It is difficult to understand how the bulk of the AngloIrish managed to live in Ireland without acquiring an Irish intonation: but they did. `To speak with a brogue in my childhood,' Elizabeth wrote `was to be underbred.' Elizabeth didn't know any Roman Catholics ... and wasn't curious about them. When she came to look back, she was very funny about certain Catholic practices - a `predisposition to frequent prayer' she remembered `bespoke to me some incontinence of the soul'." The Bowen family had been living in Ireland for the better part of 300 years by then.
IT was not until 1940 that Elizabeth Bowen struck an Irish pose, and that was for espionage purposes in the services of the British state. Britain was doing very badly in the war which it had declared in 1939 and Churchill was considering the feasibility of seizing some Irish ports to facilitate naval operations. Elizabeth's espionage task was to feel out Irish opinion on the issue and in performing it she went from Regent's Park to the ancestral Cromwellian home in north Cork and declared herself an Irish writer.
But she continued to write her very English novels. And in 1942 she published a jingoist book on English novelists, in which she included the Irish-born Sterne and the Indian-born Thackeray and Kipling. She continued to live in Ireland for some years after the war out of disgust at the 1945 defeat of Churchill and the socialist phase that England then embarked upon. She was a refugee from "these middle-class Labour wets with their Old London School of Economics ties and their women. Scratch any of these little cuties and you find the governess. Or so I have always found."
The long English colonial presence in Ireland gave rise to literary and other phenomena which are not easily classified. There is, for example, G.B. Shaw who was Anglo-Irish by origin but who made a career in England as a stage-Irishman. And there is Wilde, who did not play the stage-Irishman or any kind of Irishman, but who contributed to English literature a dimension that made England uncomfortable, while stimulating it. But Elizabeth Bowen was so quintessentially an English writer of her time and class in both style and subject-matter that one is at a loss to account for John Boland's remark that "the unpleasant odour of racism is unignorable". Perhaps what he meant to say was that we were privileged to have so English a writer born among us, and that we should remake ourselves in her image and rid ourselves of all this Irish stuff.
Jack Lane is president of the Aubane Historical Society, Aubane, Millstreet, Co Cork.
