Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child

Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child To read Elizabeth Bowen is to enter, both with pleasure and with consternation, the world of the Anglo-Irish in their decline. By the time Bowen was born, in 1899, the shadows of what Mark Bence-Jones has called (in his 1987 book of the same name) the “Twilight of the Ascendancy” had already lengthened. Though she spent most of her adult life in England, and London is in some ways the center of her fictional world, Elizabeth Bowen was the daughter of a County Cork big house called Bowen’s Court, which she inherited and, unable to afford its upkeep on her earnings as a writer, eventually had to sell in 1959. The alienation of the Anglo-Irish landowner, set above and isolated from the “native” population, is a vantage point to which Bowen refers often in writing of Ireland. “I have grown up,” she writes in her essay “The Big House” (1940), “accustomed to seeing out of my windows nothing but grass, sky, trees, to being enclosed in a ring of almost complete silence and to Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 104 making journeys for anything that I want.” Visiting these houses today as a guest or a tourist, one feels the uncanny accuracy with which Bowen captures the strangeness emanating from these grey limestone piles. Palladian or neo-Gothic, set starkly against the primal green of the Irish countryside: Each house seems to live under its own spell, and that is the spell that falls on the visitor from the moment he passes in at the gates. The ring of woods inside the demesne wall conceals , at first, the whole demesne from the eye: this looks, from the road, like a bois dormant with a great glade inside. Inside the gates the avenue often describes loops, to make itself of still more extravagant length; it is sometimes arched by beeches, sometimes silent with moss. On each side lie those tree-studded grass spaces we Anglo-Irish call lawns and English people puzzle us by speaking of as “the park.” On these browse cattle, or there may be horses out on the grass. A second gate—(generally white-painted, so that one may not drive into it in the dark)—keeps these away from the house in its inner circle of trees. Having shut this clanking white gate behind one, one takes the last reach of avenue and meets the faded, dark-windowed and somehow hypnotic stare of the big house. Often a line of mountains rises above it, or a river is seen through a break in woods. But the house, in its silence, seems to be contemplating the swell or fall of its own lawns. The sense of the house “contemplating” its surroundings is pure Bowen—one of many instances of a house as a living entity: an Irish house or just any house. In her novel The House in Paris (1949), she writes: “The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house.” Just how remote, how starved these houses felt when their day had passed, can be gathered from the opening sentences of The Last September (1939): 105 Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 105 About six o’clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out of a net of shadow down the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreen Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency produced—arms waving and a wild escape to the wind of her mauve motor veil—an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised visitors. Many of the Anglo-Irish found it convenient to forget how they came by their land in the first place. In Bowen’s Court (1942, revised 1964), her classic family history, and elsewhere, Elizabeth Bowen does not shy away from admitting that her original Welsh ancestor (the name Bowen derives from Welsh ap Owen, “son of Owen”) was granted land taken from the defeated Irish owners as booty from Oliver Cromwell’s campaign to put down the rebellion of the 1640s. At the same time she unapologetically makes a claim for...