Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James

Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James by John Halperin, Vanderbilt University In the 1940s, Elizabeth Bowen had occasion to wonder if her prose style was beginning to resemble Henry James's. Her editors complained to her tiiat sections of 7"Ae Heat of the Day (1949) were "more Jacobean than James. " Asked in 1959 about bis influence upon her work, she replied : "you can't say it's like catching the measles, because it's a splendid style, but it's a dangerous style." She disliked , she said, the very late James: "I reaUy belong to The Portrait of A Lady." Her friend Virginia Woolf warned her in the thirties to beware of the influence of James, Bowen reported: ' ' she foresaw him as a danger to me" (Glendinning 153, 99). From this time on, Bowen asked her editors to scrutinize her manuscripts carefully and to watch out for double negatives, for sentences that placed the adverb before the verb on the "To whom do you beautifully belong?" model, for grammatical inversions and stylistic tricks in general. She was very much aware of the Jamesian "measles ," and somewhat apprehensive about them. Despite her vigilance, her style resembles James's in many particulars. Harrison says to Stella in The Heat of the Day: "You, I mean to say, have got along on the assumption that things don't happen; I, on the other hand, have taken it that things happen rather than not. Therefore, what you see is what I've seen all along" (TiD 25). "You're great; it's that that I've felt in you," one character tells another in "Aunt Tatty." In "The Inherited Clock" Clara says to Paul: "Have you no idea that I've no idea what you mean?" (CS 271 and 636). But there is much more here than merely a stylistic resemblance. The two novelists shared many assumptions about what fiction should do and how it should do it. The echoes of James one hears everywhere in Bowen's work, from her first novel to her last and all through the stories, are the products more of a temperamental affinity as artists than of conscious or unconscious mimicry. James is mentioned twice by name in Bowen's fietion . Of a character in her last novel, Eva Trout (1968), it is said: "This mannered manner of his was not quite the thing: no. Yet the ambiguities had one sort of merit, or promise—one was at least on the verge of the Henry James country" (£T28). In The Last September (1929), published forty years earlier, Laurence, home from Oxford for the holidays, remarks: "Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the [river]. ... It was a gold one, left over from an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from die days when they wore opera cloaks and masked, and killed ladies. It was very period, very original; I called it Henry James; I loved it" (LS 47). But· we do not need such clues to detect James's ghostly presence everywhere in Bowen. The emphatically similar community of interests they shared as writers is striking. Interest in the magical moment of psychological insight, of sudden vision, is common to the work of both. Both deal in their fiction with highly intelligent people; on the one occasion when Bowen departed from this practice, she self-consciously made fun of herself and her subject by calling the story "The Dolt's Tale." Her dialogue, like James's, is less naturalistic than expressive. Uninterested in pohtics, and believing in any case that art and politics must not mix, luce James she was so certain of the value of civilized behavior that to articulate this belief directly in her work would have seemed to her inept. An instinctive artist, with an instinctive sense of form, she shared James's interest in what she called "the art of exclusion" in her writing; "shape is possibly the important thing" in fiction, she said (WAy Do I Write? 24). She, too, declared that the French novelists had influenced her more than the English— and said: "I am fully intelligent only when I write" (Glendinning 165, 116...