The Love-Charm of Bombs (63 page)

Elizabeth was always clear in seeing Alan as the person whose support made her writing possible. He organised her life, armoured her with practical and emotional security and believed fervently in her work, knowing long passages from her novels by heart. In an autobiographical note written in 1953 Elizabeth made this debt explicit: ‘To his belief in my work, and patience with the vagaries of a writer-wife, I owe everything.' Theirs had not always been a passionate relationship, but its day-to-day rhythms had been the rhythms of most of Elizabeth's adult life. The frightening intensity of Elizabeth's vulnerability with Charles had been sustainable largely because of the comforting protection of Alan's love. Now, she was left feeling helpless and disorientated by his death. In the letter to Berlin she says that since August she has been trying to read
The Times
because up to now this has been Alan's role in the relationship and she feels that ‘there must be one person in the family who does so'. With him, she has lost ‘the feeling of being located, fixed, held by someone else not only in affection but in their sense of reality'. She now lacks ‘the feeling of home and of being protected from winds that blow'. Alan was both her father and mother, ‘brought nearer by also being a contemporary'. Legally and psychologically, she now has no next of kin – the closest she has to a family is Bowen's Court itself.

In the aftermath of Alan's death, Elizabeth became increasingly aware of her dependency on Charles. Her life was busy without him; in the year after Alan's death she lectured in Italy, Germany and America; she was much in demand at American universities and now had an independent social life in New York. But year after year, Elizabeth hoped that Charles would give more than he turned out to be able to give; instead, there was one disappointment after another as projected visits failed to materialise and love – that life which cried out to be lived – remained locked in the beautiful but intangible world of letters. After Charles left Bowen's Court at the end of a visit in the summer of 1953, Elizabeth felt physically ill, as though his departure had done something to her stomach. Each time they were together, there was ‘a world of timeless and complete happiness', interrupted by ‘a blade of anguish coming down like a guillotine'. ‘Do you know,' she wrote to him in July 1954, ‘it sometimes tears at me like one of those iron hooks used (I believe) by medieval torturers, our going on being apart like this, week after week, summer after summer.'

That summer, Elizabeth visited Charles in Germany, where he had been sent as the Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, working in Bonn and living in Cologne. He was now more certain than ever of his love for Sylvia, noting in his diary the ‘growing realisation that having married for companionship I am now passionately physically in love'. If anything, it was the companionship that was lacking, and which he still found with Elizabeth instead. He experienced Elizabeth's visit as a time of ‘feverish high-pressure' followed by ‘emotional emptiness'. Self-indulgently melancholic, he wrote a mock-advertisement in his diary for ‘a life to let'; an ‘attractive property', encumbered by squatters' rights, with an owner ‘willing to rent at sacrifice price' who would consider sale.

In August, Elizabeth returned again, making scenes, distressed by Charles's increasing numbness. Writing to him over the course of the autumn, Elizabeth attempted to retain her hold over him, insisting still on ‘the uninterrupted reality of OUR life' – the only life that was a reality ‘to me and, you say, to you'. She herself was struggling to keep up this belief. ‘Oh I miss you, I miss you, I miss you – till I can hardly bear it,' she wrote in October. Hanging up the telephone after a conversation with him in November, she was left ‘so restless and with such an ache', overcome by a ‘what's-the-point-of-being-alive-when-we're-not-together feeling'.

In 1953 and 1954 Elizabeth Bowen wrote two essays about disappointment, which she described as ‘a harsh emotional blow'. In the first, she talks about the frightening power of the wreck of a hope or plan to cast the adult into the disproportionate world of childhood. Sometimes, she states, disappointment is of a magnitude which cannot be immediately taken in. As we grow older we expose ourselves to disappointment less, but it can still come upon us unawares. In love, we may experience a point-blank reverse. Some disappointments are years in the making; for example, the ‘non-achievement of happiness with another person in the course of a love affair'. What is undergone here is not a single blow but a series of ‘checkmatings, defeats, rebuffs' which, cumulatively, have the effect of ‘undermining morale or corroding character'. It is hard, in these cases, not to see oneself as a victim. There is a danger of becoming ‘that sad type, the recognisably “disappointed” person'.

After this painfully personal analysis of the state of disappointment, Bowen goes on to wonder how to survive the pain. She is sure that the answer is not to inure oneself against disappointment by ceasing to feel. Instead, we must learn to surmount disappointment, once it occurs, by asking ‘How far may this be my fault?' ‘Is it a fact, for instance, that you or I
have
been living in something of a dream world? If so, there was almost bound to be a collision with reality.' Disappointment teaches the fantasist the necessary but hurtful lesson. And this form of disappointment is most painful in a love relationship.

 

Self-deception may play a part in romantic love. Have we, through over-idealisation, created as the object of our affections someone who in reality never was? Have we insisted on being blind to the true nature of the man or woman on whom we set our hearts? If so, a false situation has arisen: the loved one sooner or later
must
give us pain by no more than being himself.

 

In this case, we must admit our own share in what has come about in order to be healed.

This essay reads, if not as an apology to Charles, then as an admission of partial guilt. But, like
The Heat of the Day
, it is also a warning. If Elizabeth is disappointed because she has been blind to Charles's true nature, then it is because he is considerably less loveable than she has believed. If he is going to let her take the blame for her own disappointment, then he must accept that she will lose her high opinion of him. Elizabeth does provide an alternative to delusion. Some disappointments, she says, are not our fault. Sometimes, bewilderingly, ‘someone we had the right to trust' backs down. In these cases, the sufferer ‘
is
a victim truly'; they are ‘cases of outrage to tender love'. In situations such as these, we are ‘assailed in our sense of justice – the best in us seems to have gone for nothing'. Here she offers Charles another possibility: he can be the man she thought he was, but then he must take all the responsibility for her disappointment upon himself.

Either way, for her, there is no easy solution to this pain. ‘Alone we must set out to rebuild ourselves.' Recuperation will be painful and slow. It is crucial to regain a sense of perspective; to view one's own life in the context of the wider world and to see that life contains alternatives to the particular aim or person on which we had concentrated our thoughts and feelings. There is no point embarking on a new course of action just for the sake of it. ‘Disappointment has to be faced out.' Indeed, like ‘all forms of primal experience', it has ‘a sort of dignity', deepening our knowledge of ourselves and others.

This essay remained unpublished and it was only the second, much shorter and less personally revealing essay on disappointment that Bowen allowed to be exposed to public scrutiny. The second essay does not refer specifically to love, and is focused instead on the suffering of children. The personal note intrudes only at the end, where Bowen maintains that we should ‘never underrate disappointment', which is ‘seldom distant' and ‘always hurts'.

In choosing to write about disappointment, Elizabeth was facing the limitations of her relationship with Charles. It was becoming apparent that they would never see each other as much as she would like, and she now needed to decide whether the happiness the love affair brought her was worth the pain. Should she leave Charles and find someone prepared to commit to her more fully? She answered this in part by writing
A World of Love
, which was published in 1955 and is at once a disappointed and an ecstatic novel. Charles read the American edition of the novel while staying at Bowen's Court in December 1954. It was a difficult visit, still shadowed by their scenes in Germany that summer. Arriving in the house, Charles felt as if he was ‘looking at life through bi-focals'; he was wary of Elizabeth, who warned him that if his present life continued he would ‘go mad or die'. He feared more realistically that he would dry up emotionally, ‘cease to care or even notice that this is happening to me'. He did not want his precarious balance to be undermined by the profound unhappiness which she showed only to him.

Gradually, the magic of the relationship returned. The next day, they continued to discuss the numbness of his feelings but he was experiencing ‘a sort of exhilaration' in being with her; the gash in their love caused by Bonn was starting to close. A moment of breakthrough came when he read the new novel, convinced that in spite of ‘loneliness, sorrow, despair, she has written this masterpiece of her art'. He found it hard to believe that she had written the final chapters ‘in the nightmare agitation of that visit to Bonn', thinking that if ‘she was as distractedly unhappy over us as she seemed', it was incredible that she could have written so confidently. He gave himself credit for its success. ‘It is our book as it contains our shared illusion of life and could not, as they say in prefaces, have been written without me!' The book had come at a price ‘paid by her, perhaps even more by me'.

In some ways Charles is still more central to
A World of Love
than to
The Heat of the Day
, where Stella's love for Robert is one of a number of competing plotlines and themes. The new novel portrays a world haunted by the charismatic, fickle personality of Guy, one-time owner of Montefort, the latest incarnation of Bowen's Court. Twenty-five years on from
The Last September
, Bowen's literary Big House has fallen into disrepair. The roof leaks, the house is covered with moss, most of the neighbours believe it to be empty. In fact, it is inhabited by five desultory figures, three of whom are in love with Guy, who was killed in the First World War. There is his cousin Antonia, a childhood playmate and his equal in spirit and haughtiness (‘The way you two were, you could have run the world,' her illegitimate cousin Fred tells her). Then there is Lilia, Guy's one-time fiancé whom, after Guy's death, Antonia invited to live at Montefort, which would rightfully have been hers if Guy had made a will. And there is Jane, daughter of a union between Lilia and Fred which Antonia has arranged for the sake of the house. Jane, ‘perfectly ready to be a woman but not yet so', is the more beautiful successor of Lois in
The Last September
; the kid whom Sean O'Faolain saw as being ever at the mercy of the cad. And the cad is her dead cousin Guy, a fickle charmer who in his life ‘had stirred up too much', scattering round him ‘more promises as to some dreamed-of extreme of being than one man could have hoped to live to honour'.

Guy should by rights have been Jane's father, but instead he comes into her life as a ghostly fantasy lover when she finds his love letters in a trunk in the attic at the start of the book. And
A World of Love
is not just a sorrowful tribute to Charles and a paean to love, but also an elegiac testament to the power of letters. In her first appearance, Jane is wandering ecstatically around the garden, rereading a letter which she knows more than half by heart. Guy's letters are written in ‘a speaking language', imbued with all the power of love. Described by him, the garden of the house in which he writes and Jane reads the letters becomes poetically immortal. ‘
I thought
', he writes, ‘
if only YOU had been here!
' Given the letter's power, Jane finds it impossible that she could be too late. ‘Here was the hour, still to be lived!' His letters have been no more than delayed on their way to her. ‘But here I am. Oh, here I
am
!' she protests.

Like Charles, Guy haunts the house he once inhabited. Brought back to life by his letters, he appears with a hallucinatory clearness before the women who love him. Jane, at a dinner party at a nearby castle, draws a ‘profound breath' and asks a fellow guest if he knew her cousin Guy. Once the name leaves her lips and enters the room, Guy appears among them; the recoil of the others marks his triumphant displacement of their air. The men at the dinner party help to compose Guy, but remain ‘tributary to him and less real to Jane – that is, as embodiments' than he is. She sits listening for his voice, hoping never in all her life again to be so aware of him, or indeed of anyone as ‘the annihilation-point of sensation' comes into view. Back at home Antonia, overwrought, lectures Jane on the question of ‘what memory costs', overcome by ‘the annihilating need left behind by Guy'. Looking outside, she sees her youth and Guy's from every direction. He is more present than a ghost: ‘time again was into the clutch of herself and Guy'. ‘The intensity of a brought-about recollection', the narrator states, speaking from painful experience, ‘leaves one worn down; it consumes cells of the being if not the body.' Guy has become immortal through the longings of these women. Lilia, whose life has been marked out by the loss of love, watches herself and Guy come round the corner, both ‘deep in love'.