ELIZABETH BOWEN
1115
Katherine Mansfield-is extraordinarily
f~uent
and diverting; one
hardly notices, under its spell, the bias of the content, the oppressive
tidiness of the values.
In
these novels, love's prerogatives are real;
ambivalence
is
wicked, a moral and also a social failure, for the con–
flicts are somehow a part of the class struggle and the author appears
to be a conservative of nostalgic temperament.
The opinion, or sentiment, that occurs again and again in Eliza–
beth Bowen's fiction and which seems to have commanded the labors
on her ancestral chronicle,
Bowen's Court,
is that to know
who
you
are, to be close to your past, to feel the pride and obligations of family
and place, are, if not the most exquisite and difficult attainments, a
great source of personal and national virtue. These warm, sustaining
emotions are found most frequently in the gentry and upper class;
the disloyal, the insincere and unreliable are the homeless, the shape–
less nobodys, the complacent, vapid middle class, the mysterious
foreigner, the restless, self-loving
arriviste
In
the case of very young
girls, such as Lois
~
The Last September
and Portia in
The Death of
the Heart,
the pattern is reversed and the family betrays. However,
here the reversal is necessary for pathos, the thundershowers of pity
that are the main weather of these two novels. By whom can a young
girl be more miserably misunderstood, since she has little freedom of
movement, than by her family? To be sure, Portia in
The Death of
the Heart
has a more democratic fate: she
is
victimized impartially
by all classes and with such supererogatory heartlessness that one
yawns, occasionally, and suspects Portia really may be the nuisance
her selfish betrayers believe. Even in this book, with its villainous
cast, the real sewer of corruption is a young man, Eddie, who has
overdrawn himself socially.
He had been the brilliant child of an obscure home, and came up to
Oxford ready to have his head turned. There he was taken up, played
up, played about with, taken down, let down, finally sent down for one
idiotic act. His appearance was charming: he had a proletarian, animal,
quick grace. His manner, after a year of trying to get the pitch, had
become bold, vivid and intimate.
As
a sort of subhead to hereditary class, there occurs the abstract
notion of Home, representing familiarities, allegiances, duties and
affections; under Home there is a particularity, the actual house in
