Books: The Innocent and Damned

THE DEATH OF THE HEART—Elizabeth Bowen—Knopf ($2.50).

The most gifted living women novelists are Virginia Woolf, Willa Gather, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Elizabeth Bowen. Among these, the most promising future belongs to Elizabeth Bowen. With her fifth and best novel, The Death of the Heart, she comes to the literary maturity promised in her other four—promised as far back, in fact, as the 205, when she published her first short stories in The Dial. Plain readers should find her coming-of-age as congenial as the most exacting critic.

Ironic comedy as well as tragedy, The Death of the Heart tells a story as old as wickedness: the world’s betrayal of innocence. But Elizabeth Bowen also introduces a provocative interaction: the world’s discomfiture at the hands of the innocent. One paragraph condenses the pattern of the simple theme:

“Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. . . . The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. . . . The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.”

The Death of the Heart describes such a meeting. Heroine is Portia Quayne, a product of a lonely, itinerant girlhood with her mother in second-rate European hotels. Orphaned at 16, she goes to live with her halfbrother, a successful London ad man. His wife, a sophisticated dilettante, grudgingly tolerates Portia at the beginning, detests her after she finds and reads Portia’s diary, whose wide-eyed observations on her guardians read like satire.

Thereafter, uncertain whether Portia is “a snake or a rabbit,” the wife treats her like someone who knows where the body is buried. Simple-hearted Portia (she had “those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere”) merely tries to figure out what makes these enigmatic grownups tick.

The other innocent is Eddie, one of the wife’s bright young men. Several years older than Portia, malicious, cynical, charming, he is that far more complex character, the corrupt innocent, who “had gone wrong through dealing with other people in terms that he found later were not their own.” To him, Portia’s innocence is a last oasis in the world’s wasteland. But he plays her false with another girl, compromises her with everybody, ironically completes his betrayal when he refuses her love, saying she has the same ulterior motives as everybody else.

Portia’s betrayal is climaxed when she discovers that her diary has been discovered and talked about. She runs away, first to Eddie, who turns her down cold, then to a middle-aged innocent, who betrays her hysterical marriage proposal by telephoning her guardians to come and get her.

The Author. Like Henry James and Proust, whose craftsmanship and insight she more simply recalls, tall, shy, angular, 39-year-old Elizabeth Bowen belongs to the upper middle class which she skilfully anatomizes. The fashionable residence of her novel is modeled on her own Regent’s Park house, a five-story Georgian mansion, where she lives with her husband, Alan Cameron, former Oxford don, now children’s educational director for BBC. In this ritzy, rumbling house (the Underground passes directly underneath) The Death of the Heart three years ago got off to a slow start because Author Bowen spent most of her time on stairways talking to the servants. When an inter-room telephone system was installed, the novel went swimmingly. Working seven hours at a stretch, she typed about 1,000 words a day.

For relaxation Elizabeth Bowen likes movies, music (swing as well as Beethoven), long walks, small, gay dinner parties. A poised and witty hostess, she knows many people, but her close friends are fellow writers: H. G. Wells, who lives nearby, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Rose Macaulay.

Once every few months, and always for the summer, Elizabeth Bowen goes to Bowen’s Court, County Cork, Ireland, an enormous, 18th-Century grey stone house, on land given to her ancestor, a Welsh Captain Bowen, by Cromwell. She inherited it in 1931. Despite its lack of electricity and plumbing, she likes it better than any place on earth.

From the age of twelve, when her mother died of cancer, till she was 23, when she married, Elizabeth Bowen lived much of the time with relatives in England, or on her own in Continental and English boarding houses, returning to Bowen’s Court only on visits.