A striking moment from Elizabeth Bowen's life is described in a letter she wrote to her lover Charles Ritchie in 1958, standing up, as she tells us, in the GPO in Cork. Bowen was on her way to Italy, to research her travel book, A Time in Rome, and her letter to Ritchie includes an urgent request for a loan of $100 from him. Despite her success as a writer and despite inheriting her family home in north Cork, Bowen's Court, (or maybe because of it), Bowen relied on journalism and reviewing to make a precarious living, earning £500 alone from reviews in 1947, when her overall professional income was just over £2,000.
The Weight of a World of Feeling, a new collection of her reviews, provides a fascinating account of her journalistic work from 1935 onwards, right up to her final review, fittingly enough, of JG Farrell's Troubles in 1971.
Previously, the editor Allan Hepburn published scholarly collections of her radio broadcasts, her essays and her uncollected stories. This new book further extends our knowledge of her working life with a revealing portrait of Bowen as critic. Already an established novelist and short story writer, Bowen began reviewing for the New Statesman in 1935, occasionally writing as well for the Spectator, the Bell and the Observer, then becoming a regular columnist for Tattler and later on for the New York Times Book Review.
In these journals, Bowen reviewed many friends and colleagues – Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Rosamond Lehmann among others – and her essay on Virginia Woolf's essays in The Death of the Moth for the Tatler in 1942 draws on memories of their close friendship. "Having known her, I know it is wrong to see her as a sort of Lady of Shalott, who could only bear to behold life when it was reflected into a mirror – the mirror being the mirror of art. No, actually she was a woman who was in love with every sensation connected with being alive. She loved no book better than she loved the living of a quite ordinary day."
Likewise, another great figure of modernism inspires some of Bowen's best critical writing here. In her 1939 review of Finnegans Wake she says it is not a book to review. "It should be read in a year, not in a month. Its magnitude, its closeness, its density reprove the quick-running eye; the whole book is within the compass of one single mind only – Joyce's own." In contrast, (and rightly, in my opinion), she writes in less glowing but still respectful terms in the same review of Flann O'Brien's first novel. "At Swim-Two-Birds could be better – which is saying a good deal. If Mr Flann O'Brien is derivative, he is derivative originally. He has a sense of the comic, but helped out … Dublin does breed nightmare, and fantastic escapes. And there was Dublin, as Mr O'Brien knows it, before there was Joyce; the trouble is to know which is which, now. On the whole, though, Joyce has done as much good as harm."
In reviewing Herman Gorman’s 1941 biography of Joyce, Bowen sums up Joyce’s relationship with Catholicism in this elegantly phrased, acute sentence: “He was reared and educated in a religion from which a deep nature does not without crisis secede and from which a lonely nature dreads to detach itself.” This sentence alone encapsulates the pleasure in reading Bowen’s criticism. Firstly, she sums up Joyce’s complex relationship with Catholicism astutely and without simplification. Secondly, the sentence in itself makes you stop and reread it. Bowen finds a symmetry and a kind of architectural balance in her phrasing that Jane Austen would have admired.
Other Irish writers included in her reviewing are her one-time lover and lifelong friend Seán Ó Faoláin, whose novel Come Back to Erin was resoundingly acclaimed in 1940. Bowen also reviewed short story collections by Frank Connor, a memoir by Sean O'Casey, a novel by Denis Johnston and a story collection by Mary Lavin with warmth and empathy, displaying her close interest in her Irish contemporaries and her sensitivity to Irish literary developments.
When Bowen faced a novelist of a new generation, writing in a genre very different to her own, she was respectful if quizzical, as with her 1949 review of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. "Mr Mailer is a serious artist who has embarked on a large, important design, in the execution of which he has stopped at nothing… I cannot regret my survival (for it was a case of that) of an entire reading of The Naked and the Dead: ultimately, something was added to my experience. What is likely to be this novel's future in this country, I cannot say."
Hepburn includes some short biographical essays, with this poignant description of Bowen’s mother’s death providing a heart-breaking final sentence: ‘This happy life with my mother in our succession of small houses, in a delicious companionship which our difference in ages hardly affected at all, came to an end with a shock: her death, of cancer, when I was thirteen. I had known she was ill, but not so ill, and when she died, I felt I should never trust life again.” However much of a struggle Bowen found it to keep up her punishing writing schedules, in a sense we are lucky Bowen needed to work as hard as she did, as these reviews provide for us with an invaluable map of her reading, giving us what Hepburn calls “a poetics of fiction”. In his excellent introduction he argues that, “in a manner of speaking, Bowen’s reviews form a reader’s diary that stretches from the 1930s until the 1970s”. Allan Hepburn has provided another admirable chapter of Bowen scholarship, deepening our knowledge of, and our engagement with, one of the most important novelists of the 20th century.
Eibhear Walshe lectures in the school of English, UCC. His novel The Diary of Mary Travers was published by Somerville Press in 2014.
