1118
PARTISAN REVIEW
of this motivation for treason. You feel as
if
you'd witnessed a fas–
cinating crime and then heard the neighbors, rocking in their porch
chairs, explaining, "I'm not surprised. That boy never appreciated his
home!" Aside from the amount of "bad taste," vulgarity, discomfort,
nothingness, useless property and vexing poverty vigorously defended
by both sides in every war, Miss Bowen is too cautious to mention the
one thing that
might
have motivated Robert Kelway, anti-Semitism,
since it is hard to see what else the Nazis had to export to England
and America. (Nobody took the body building exercises seriously.)
The Heat of the Day
is a curiously sentimental and confused reflec–
tion on a deplorable family with a stunted sense of the emotional
value of property; and that this is the true theme is elaborately and
tediously acknowledged by the subplot, which has to do with an estate
in Ireland inherited by Stella Rodney's son.
As
a political novel, or a
commentary on the English middle class, or a character novel, except
for the engaging treatment of Stella Rodney, it is too impalpable to
be held in the mind.
The House in, Paris
is widely esteemed, or at least I
believe
that
to be the case. (Nothing is more difficult to track down than Miss
Bowen's true reputation. Praise, so far as I have read, is indefinite and
generally brief, a quick smile from Connolly, Pritchett or E. Sack–
ville-West. Animadversion, is equally curt. I have the feeling the
Scrutiny
people lump Miss Bowen with such writers as Rose Macauley
and Rosamund Lehmann.) The mystery and witchery in
The House
in Paris,
the sinister French boarding house, the unfathomable Mme.
Fisher, and the farouche, precocious children are somewhat spurious
and overwrought, in contrast to the love affair in the center of the
novel which is a shy and incomplete Jamesian international episode.
Karen Michaelis, wealthy, family-loving, rooted English girl, falls
in love with Max Ebhart, a French Jew of highly conventionalized
conception: neurotic, homeless, intelligent, nervous, ambitious. ("I
cannot live in a love affair, I am busy and grasping. I am not Eng–
lish; you know I have no humor to cushion myself with; I am nervous
all the time.") Max is literally and symbolically homeless; Karen feels
with him "more cut off from her own country than if they had been in
Peru." Max commits suicide and Karen bears his child illegitimately.
Max is the most sympathetically treated of Miss Bowen's major male
