Illb
PARTISAN REVIEW
which the character lives. From the Home or lack of it, one's house,
enriching or blighting the senses and manners, Elizabeth Bowen
creates a fantastic environmental psychology, as implacable, ma–
terialistic and mortifying as the verdict of a property assessor. For
those who pass the test, and it is character that is at stake, the
images are loving and generous. In
Bowen.'s Court
she writes:
Yes, here is the picture of peace-in the house, in the country round.
Like all pictures, it does not quite correspond with any reality. Or, you
may call the country a magic mirror, reflecting something that could
not really exist.... I suppose that everyone, fighting or just enduring,
now carries one private
image-~me
peaceful scene-in his heart. Mine
is Bowen's Court. War has made me this image out of a house built
of anxious history.
And about Karen Michaelis in
The House in Paris:
The Michaelis lived like a family in a pre-war novel in one of the tall,
cream houses in Chester Terrace, Regent's Park. Their relatives and
old friends, as nice as they were themselves, were rooted in the same
soil. . . . That unconscious sereneness behind their living and letting
live was what Karen's hungry or angry friends could not tolerate.
Frequently, the environmental ethic slips down a peg or two to
include not only the family and the house but the very furnishings.
By a complicated theology of objects the noble and the lost soul are
defined. This is the moral intransigence of the interior decorator, the
wrath of the goddess of the drapery and table setting. Peace is a
well-lit drawing room, purity' is light, airy, spacious and in its
presence the glasses shine and the flowers are forever fresh. The guilty
lead an uneasy existence among the thick, dark, impersonal objects
in a furnished room (Eddie in
The Death of the Heart);
or com–
municate rudely with family members by means of a speaking tube
(Markie in
To the North)
;
or bear upon their souls the terrible scar
of one of those boy's dens, in which the coins, birds' eggs, trophies
and snapshots of youth are kept intact by a vulgar family (Robert
Kelway in
The Heat of the Day).
In
The Heat of the Day,
Miss Bowen's recent novel, the limita–
tions of these sentiments are most painful. This is the story of a per–
sonable man of reasonably typical experience who betrays his coun–
try to the Nazis. No doubt such a decision for a man like Robert Kel-
