fruits and, eventually, apples and pears.
*
In 1937 Seán’s mind, too, was on a house, but perversely it was less on ours than on the decline and fall of an Irish ‘Big House’ which the novelist Elizabeth Bowen had imagined from an insider’s viewpoint in her novel
The Last September,
while he saw it from that of the rebels in his own story ‘A Midsummer Night’s Madness’. (Maria Edgeworth had, of course, got in long before either of them with
Castle Rackrent
.) Though Bowen’s novel had appeared in 1929, it was only now, eight years later, that he came across it. That was the year when he and Eileen left the US for England, so he must have been too busy settling into his job at Strawberry Hill to keep up with new novels. Now, though, he did read it and was captivated. He thought of its author as ‘an Irish Turgenev’ – an immense compliment, coming from him: not only because Turgenev was his favourite writer but also, as he started to see that his own novels were less successful than hisstories, he blamed this on the narrowness of social experience in the new Ireland where, as he would note in his memoirs, ‘a great levelling had begun’. Comparing this new Ireland to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England, his memoirs quote Henry James’s reflections on the compassion one must feel ‘for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field’. The quotation continues: ‘It takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.’ This complexity, wrote James, was sadly lacking in Hawthorne’s New England just as it was, Seán contended, in the new simpler Ireland.
As I type, my fingers slacken on the keys.
They itch to argue with him about the many powerful novels, even some of James’s own, which owe their punch to the narrowness of choice open to their protagonists. What about
The Awkward Age
and
Washington Square,
not to speak of
The Golden Bowl
? Need simplifies, and, in those books it is need, rather than complexity of manners, which drives their characters’ fate, as it does in
Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, Ethan Frome
and great stretches of Dostoevsky’s narratives.
Meanwhile, Seán began to think of Elizabeth Bowen herself as ‘a dramatic character, strayed from perhaps
The Last September,
one of its young Irish girls become fifteen years or so older, married … more aware …’
The next – unacknowledged – step could have been to see himself also as a character, strayed perhaps from Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le noir,
which he adored, one of whose great scenes shows the educated peasant, Julien Sorel, forcing himself to take hold of his snooty employer’s wife’s hand and hold on to it long enough to test his nerve. Did Seán make the analogy? His memoirs don’t say, but their musings about novel-writing conclude that ‘the Czarist Novel’ – remember he is thinking of Turgenev – ‘was written by an élite, about an élite, for an élite’ and finally admitthat where this had been leading him was to stray, emotionally, albeit perhaps briefly,
into
a novel. Suffering from a nine-year itch (he had married my mother in 1928), he had developed a cerebral passion for his imagined ‘Irish Turgenev’. They hadn’t met, but to remedy this, an amused Derek Verschoyle, editor of
The Spectator
for which Seán sometimes reviewed, arranged a small luncheon party at his London club and, one may guess, prepared the ground by telling Elizabeth how keenly this ex-IRA man admired her. Seán was good-looking, and it seems that Bowen’s marriage, though solid, was unconsummated. So he and she began an affair. ‘Why’, he later remembered wondering during that lunch, ‘might I not learn as much from her about Woman as I had already learned from Turgenev about Writing?’
Interestingly, her next lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie whom she would meet in 1941 and love for thirty years, considered her writing
*
In 1937 Seán’s mind, too, was on a house, but perversely it was less on ours than on the decline and fall of an Irish ‘Big House’ which the novelist Elizabeth Bowen had imagined from an insider’s viewpoint in her novel
The Last September,
while he saw it from that of the rebels in his own story ‘A Midsummer Night’s Madness’. (Maria Edgeworth had, of course, got in long before either of them with
Castle Rackrent
.) Though Bowen’s novel had appeared in 1929, it was only now, eight years later, that he came across it. That was the year when he and Eileen left the US for England, so he must have been too busy settling into his job at Strawberry Hill to keep up with new novels. Now, though, he did read it and was captivated. He thought of its author as ‘an Irish Turgenev’ – an immense compliment, coming from him: not only because Turgenev was his favourite writer but also, as he started to see that his own novels were less successful than hisstories, he blamed this on the narrowness of social experience in the new Ireland where, as he would note in his memoirs, ‘a great levelling had begun’. Comparing this new Ireland to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England, his memoirs quote Henry James’s reflections on the compassion one must feel ‘for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field’. The quotation continues: ‘It takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.’ This complexity, wrote James, was sadly lacking in Hawthorne’s New England just as it was, Seán contended, in the new simpler Ireland.
As I type, my fingers slacken on the keys.
They itch to argue with him about the many powerful novels, even some of James’s own, which owe their punch to the narrowness of choice open to their protagonists. What about
The Awkward Age
and
Washington Square,
not to speak of
The Golden Bowl
? Need simplifies, and, in those books it is need, rather than complexity of manners, which drives their characters’ fate, as it does in
Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, Ethan Frome
and great stretches of Dostoevsky’s narratives.
Meanwhile, Seán began to think of Elizabeth Bowen herself as ‘a dramatic character, strayed from perhaps
The Last September,
one of its young Irish girls become fifteen years or so older, married … more aware …’
The next – unacknowledged – step could have been to see himself also as a character, strayed perhaps from Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le noir,
which he adored, one of whose great scenes shows the educated peasant, Julien Sorel, forcing himself to take hold of his snooty employer’s wife’s hand and hold on to it long enough to test his nerve. Did Seán make the analogy? His memoirs don’t say, but their musings about novel-writing conclude that ‘the Czarist Novel’ – remember he is thinking of Turgenev – ‘was written by an élite, about an élite, for an élite’ and finally admitthat where this had been leading him was to stray, emotionally, albeit perhaps briefly,
into
a novel. Suffering from a nine-year itch (he had married my mother in 1928), he had developed a cerebral passion for his imagined ‘Irish Turgenev’. They hadn’t met, but to remedy this, an amused Derek Verschoyle, editor of
The Spectator
for which Seán sometimes reviewed, arranged a small luncheon party at his London club and, one may guess, prepared the ground by telling Elizabeth how keenly this ex-IRA man admired her. Seán was good-looking, and it seems that Bowen’s marriage, though solid, was unconsummated. So he and she began an affair. ‘Why’, he later remembered wondering during that lunch, ‘might I not learn as much from her about Woman as I had already learned from Turgenev about Writing?’
Interestingly, her next lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie whom she would meet in 1941 and love for thirty years, considered her writing
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