Writers

Elizabeth Bowen

The Last September (1929) North County Cork

'For in February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the death –execution, rather –of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth [. . . ]  It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning.'

TIMELINE

‘I took the existence of Roman Catholics for granted but met few and was not interested in them. They were simply “the others,” whose world lay alongside ours but never touched. As to the difference between the two religions, I was too discreet to ask questions –if I wanted to know. This appeared to share a delicate, awkward aura with those two other differences –of sex, of class. So quickly in a child’s mind, does prudery seed itself and make growth that I remember, even, an almost sexual shyness on the subjects of Roman Catholics’ (2).

Bowen’s early sense of difference became spatialised in her memory:  ‘I walked with hurried step and averted cheek past porticos of churches that were “not ours,” uncomfortably registering in my nostrils the pungent, unlikely smell that came round curtains, through swinging doors’(3). After suffering the trauma of losing her mother to cancer, and watching her father succumb to a type of mental illness, diagnosed as ‘anaemia of the brain,’  she was enrolled in 1921 to attend school at Harpenden Hall, in Hertfordshire England; for the rest of her childhood and adolescence, she lived between England and the family’s estate Bowen’s Court in north County Cork. As a result,  Bowen was identified as ‘Irish in England and English in Ireland’ (4) and reflected later that the experience prompted in her a desire to write: ‘possibly it was England made me a novelist. At an early though conscious age, I was transplanted. I arrived young, into a different mythology – in fact, into one totally alien to that of my forefathers, none of whom had resided anywhere but in Ireland for some centuries, and some of whom may never have been in England at all: the Bowens were Welsh. From now on there was to be (as for any immigrant) a cleft between my heredity and my environment – the former remaining in my case the more powerful’ (5) .  
                In August 1914, Bowen was ensconced at her father’s estate enjoying tennis parties and dances, when the eruption of the First World War  signalled the death knell for the landed Ascendancy culture in southern Ireland.   She recalled upon returning that autumn to boarding school in England, young women of Anglo-Irish pedigree were constantly being reminded of ‘the intolerable obligation of being fought for [and to keep]  remembering that men were dying for them’ (6)  She left Bowen’s Court in  1918, to volunteer in a  hospital for shell-shocked veterans, and briefly enrolled in Art School.  By 1921, Bowen had commenced her first novel Hotel, and enjoyed a brief engagement to Lieutenant John Anderson, a British Officer.  In 1923 she published a collection of short stories entitled Encounters, and married Alan Cameron, a war veteran badly gassed during  military service, who was appointed Secretary for Education for the City of Oxford in 1925.  In 1926  she published Ann Lee’s Other Stories, and in 1927 a novel entitled The Hotel.
             It was in Oxford that Bowen created the fictional ‘house-island’ of Danielstown,  and  The Last September was subsequently published in 1929. A year later in 1930, after the death of her father, she inherited Bowen’s Court.  She subsequently published a series of novels Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). In 1940 Bowen was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to write secret briefs on Éire, detailing various aspects of Irish neutrality. In 1942 she published a family history and her autobiography which were titled Bowen’s Court  and Seven Winters, respectively. In 1948 she was awarded the CBE and in 1949 published The Heat of the Day. In 1965, she purchased a home in Kent, at the summit of Hythe, and named it Carbery after her mother’s ancestral home in Ireland.

In addition to publishing  works of fiction she wrote two autobiographical works, and worked as a journalist before her death of lung cancer in 1973. She was buried in Farahy churchyard in Cork. Though Bowen’s Court survived the conflagration of war that consumed over two hundred Protestant estates during the Troubles, it was sold in 1959 and demolished; its grounds cleared for tillage. Consequently, the estate which inspired Bowen’s imagination,  remains standing only in the pages of her prose.

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Elizabeth Bowen's fiction and prose  often emphasised the secluded nature of the Anglo-Irish landed estate: 

‘. . . each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin. It is possible that Anglo-Irish people, like only children, do not know how much they miss. Their existences, like those of only children, are single, independent and secretive. Life in these house-islands has a frame of its own.’ (1)

Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September concerns the lifeworld of an Anglo-Irish family living in a landed estate named Danielstown,  located close to the British garrison town of Clonmore in Cork, during the summer of 1920.  The novel depicts the experience of  Lois Farquar,  orphaned niece of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, who is engaged to a British officer. The Naylor’s son Laurence is home from Oxford for the holidays, and the family hosts Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency and a single woman named Marda Norton, as seasonal guests. Because of class and cultural prejudice, Lady Naylor is not comfortable, or happy with Lois’ engagement. She eventually persuades the working class British officer, Gerald Lesworth, that it is his duty to end his romantic relationship with Lois. Gerald, rebuffed by the class whose property interests he is defending,  is killed in an IRA ambush.  His death foreshadows the destruction of Danielstown by Republican guerrillas at the novel’s end.  In the first section of the novel, despite the presence of a guerrilla war raging across the landscape outside the space of their demesne, the Naylors carry on their complacent lifestyles; they greet guests, host garden parties, ponder their futures and detachedly express a range of opinions towards the conflict, which they observe like one of the tennis matches being played within the walls of the estate.  As running battles between the British Army and Republican rebels flare up in  the surrounding fields, woods and roads, Bowen depicts the secluded and isolated nature of the ‘house island’:

'Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed the very fume of living.'(2)

Lois’ fickle ‘psychic state,’ is an emotional reflection of the house, betraying an impatience at the insularity of her domestic situation: ‘How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might as well be in some cocoon.’ (4)   But Lois also finds security within the ‘house-island.’ When queried by Marda Norton, why she remains at the estate,  Lois replies: ‘“I like to be in a pattern.”’ She traced a pink frond with her finger. “I like to be related; to have to be what I am, just to be is so intransitive, so lonely.”’ (5) The architectural facade of  Danielstown is  utilised to dramatic effect, to reflect the shifting emotions colouring the brief and fleeting relationship between Lois and the British officer, Gerald. The Naylor family’s estate has provided the young working class soldier with a place to emotionally anchor himself:

'. . . he thought how nice they were. In his world affections were rare and square – four square - occurring like houses in a landscape, unrelated and positive, though with sometimes a large bright looming – as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the tennis courts.' (6)

However the futility of the romance is extrapolated to the demise of the British imperial project in Ireland, as Bowen depicts Gerald arriving one rainy afternoon to  visit Lois.  The estate’s sunny and romantic ambience which had once inspired  and anchored him,  has evaporated before his eyes, and he surveys a seemingly empty and deserted house:

'The place was cold with her absence and seemed forgotten. The tennis part became a dream – parasols with their coloured sunshine, rugs spread, shimmer of midges, amiable competition of voices. Something had been wiped from the place with implied finality.' (7)

The genesis of Lois’s recognition of the Danielstown’s imminent demise occurs as she spies an IRA man ‘with the rise and fall of a stride, a resolute profile as powerful as a thought,’ (8) crossing through the woods on the estate: ‘It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne.’(9) Lois ponders the rebel’s motivation: ‘Here was something else she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: It was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.’ (10)   The sight of the resolute IRA man  jars Lois from her complacency, and she rushes back to the house to share her discovery,  she realizes that the news will be  greeted the household with a sense of  resigned apathy and detachment. Behind mental demesnes of denial the members of Danielstown wait in silent anxiety for its destruction, as Bowen reveals in Lois’ gaze upon a growing landscape of fear: 

'Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide, light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom upon whereon it was set.' (11)

In need of relief from her ‘cocooned life’ at Danielstown, Lois  attends the dance at the British military barracks to escape the estate’s isolation.  In the company of Gerald at the the garrison, Bowen writes that Lois ‘felt home again; safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness.’ (12)  Taking a walk outside of the barracks Lois and Gerald gaze out upon a hostile landscape: ‘Under the wall a sentry in-humanly paced liked a pendulum. The country bore in it a strong menace. Gerald looked out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously shivering.’ (13) Soon after the dance at the barracks, Gerald is killed in an IRA ambush, and the violence of this act of war ripples through the spaces of the village: ‘The shocking news reached Clonmore that night, about eight o’clock. It crashed upon the unknowingness of the town like a wave that for two hours, since the event, had been rising and toppling, imminent. The news crept down streets from door to door like a dull wind, fingering the nerves, pausing. In the hotel bars, heads went this way and that, quick with suspicion.’ (14)  Unlike his parents Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, Laurence seems to anticipate in such events the demise of the  Anglo-Irish and their  ‘house-island’ lifestyle.  He finds Lois standing under a  holly tree on the grounds of the estate ‘not so much rooted as indifferent.’ (15) Offering his condolences, Laurence looks out over the  ancestral demesne:

‘studying with an effort of sight and comprehension, some unfamiliar landscape.' (16)

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