"Apathetic, the injured and dying in the hospitals watched light change on walls which might fall tonight . . . Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence - not as today's dead but as yesterday's living - felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard with their torn-off senses . . . The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts . . . " Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948)
To read Elizabeth Bowen nowadays is to be transported, instantly and completely, to a world of strange shadows and eerie light, a world where disorientation is the norm and betrayal lies around every corner, even - especially - for the innocent and the good. The trouble is that, although her books have remained in print with remarkable consistency since her heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and she is accorded general, if somewhat guarded, critical acclaim, few people actually read Elizabeth Bowen any more. But as the centenary of her birth on June 7th, 1899 approaches, a flurry of activity seems to promise that, for many readers, 1999 will be the year of Bowen rediscovered.
The novels are being reissued in a Vintage Classics edition which should be complete by the end of May; a feature film of The Last September, directed by Deborah Warner with a screenplay by John Banville, is poised for release; her letters are being prepared for publication; universities have unveiled plans for seminars devoted to her work. But a television documentary to be screened in the coming weeks on both RTE and the BBC, Death of the Heart, has beaten them all to it: and as the programme's producer, Sean O Mordha, explains, the film's aim is to stimulate interest in Bowen as a writer. Not a woman's writer or a war writer or an Anglo-Irish writer.
John McGahern says: "There are just good writers and bad writers, and Elizabeth Bowen - though not all her works are in the front rank - is a very good writer indeed." There is still a deal of controversy over Bowen's place in the literary pantheon and squabbles, some vehement, can still break out on the vexed question of her Anglo-Irishness. Is she an Irish writer or an English one? She herself claimed to be really at home only "in mid-crossing between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire" - which makes Death of the Heart, with its Irish stills footage, glittering cast of contributors from both Ireland and England, archive film from Bowen's many radio and television interviews and stunning images of the London Blitz, some made by amateur film-makers and never before seen on television, a particularly apposite starting-point.
"The whole idea," says O Mordha, "was to keep Bowen up front, both visually and with extracts from her novels; to tell her story as fully as we could; to have a commentary on that story; to have history and literature meeting - and, first, last and forever, to make good television." The story is both simple and, as recounted both in Death of the Heart and in Victoria Glendinning's finely-tuned, sensitive 1985 biography, endlessly complex. A childhood divided between winters in Dublin and summers at Bowen's Court, the magnificent, dilapidated house in Co Cork built on land given to the Bowen family by Cromwell; her father's nervous breakdown and her subsequent flight, with her mother, to live on the south coast of England; her mother's death when she was 13, which led to her being raised by a committee of aunts. She was a professional writer from the age of 23, a huge success and a literary "star" who moved in the charmed circles of post-Bloomsbury sherry parties. She was, she said, "a writer first and a woman second" who managed to combine an apparently happy marriage to an educational administrator called Alan Cameron with a succession of passionate affairs; among her lovers were a scholar, a diplomat, and - though on the face of it they made an unlikely pair - that most Irish of writers, Sean O'Faolain.
During the war Bowen moved back to Co Cork and worked as an agent for the British Government, lunching with Irish politicians and opinion-makers - several of whom, notably the Fine Gael politician James Dillon, were not amused to discover, many years later, that their opinions had been quoted in her articulate, often acerbic reports to the Ministry of Information. Her interest in espionage and its uncertain loyalties surfaces in her work, especially in the 1948 novel The Heat of the Day - and as Sean O Mordha points out, she herself lived something of a double life, moving between her estate in Ireland and a very rich, stylish social life in London of which some part of her, if the viciously witty dialogue of her novels is a reliable gauge, seemed to heartily disapprove. In Death of the Heart stills photographs, interviews with academic commentators, family reminiscences, music, archive footage and literary extracts - read with sublime world-weariness by the actress Geraldine McEwan - are woven into an atmospheric collage which explores those socio-historical themes in a vivid, open-ended manner.
Both in Ireland during the Troubles, and in London during the Blitz, Bowen's was a world of summer evenings shattered by gunfire - a world which, according to the programmes executive producer, Roger Thompson of the BBC programme Bookmark, makes for almost irresistible viewing: "It's interesting that all the programmes which went out on television recently about the first world war were incredibly successful - I think as people move further and further away from having experienced the two World Wars, there is a fascination with them, and wartime London is described with tremendous power in her writing, of course." Bookmark has, says Thompson, made a point of focussing on neglected or rarely-read writers - he cites past programmes featuring Angus Wilson and Mervyn Peake - and he is adamant that the time is ripe for a Bowen revival. "She brings a very clear detail to the twists and turns of personal relationships, and that's something that's constantly being rediscovered by successive generations - to see how another generation has coped with them, written about them, is always interesting."
While almost every Bowen admirer will preface his or her remarks with the proviso that her style takes some getting used to, and some even go so far as to characterise her nervy prose as overwrought and self-conscious, what Death of the Heart makes clear, above all, is that she can now be considered a major writer who must take her place with Shaw, Wilde et al in any list of Anglo-Irish literary figures.
The critic Hermione Lee puts the kibosh on the idea that Bowen was a sort of Jane Austen of the 1930s: "she was," she remarks, "a much more dangerous and troubling writer than that." The historian Roy Foster - whose superb essay on Bowen in his 1993 collection of essays, Paddy and Mr Punch, crams a hatful of valuable insights into a handful of pages, including the observation that: "Bowen longed for order, abstraction, classical symmetry, yet wrote most brilliantly at times of dislocation and conveyed in her best writing a sense of chaos: her style is, in itself, a subversion" - points out that if she is difficult to place, hard to categorise, that's because she writes about displacement.
Ultimately, says Sean O Mordha, the film investigates the mystery of Elizabeth Bowen without trying to foist any simplistic interpretations on her as a woman, or as a writer. "A key element of any great writer is ambivalence," he says, "and she's ambivalent in many different ways. The film doesn't attempt to - and wouldn't want to - crack the mystery. I think it's great that she remains a mystery; she remains elusive. It's like trying to pick at mercury with a fork."
Death of the Heart will be screened on RTE 1 on February 2nd at 10.40 p.m., and on BBC 2's Bookmark on Sunday February 7th. The Last September, with a screenplay by John Banville based on Bowen's novel, goes on release in the autumn.
