1120
PARTISAN REVIEW
astonished that Portia should have imagined he loved her. The
heroines are bemused, credulous, and humorless; their high-minded–
ness is often only a fantastic, unrelenting literalness; we can seem
to hear their desperate pleading going on long after the disaster, "But
I thought you said-" and "How could you when-?" or "But you
promised-."
C
The men are complex, ambiguous, dissatisfied-qualities Miss
Bowen looks upon with finicky contempt. At the best,
this
contempt
gives a structure to the story and a resolution to the plot. Elizabeth
Bowen's novels
end,
usually in the death of the man
(The House
in
Paris, The Last September, The Heat of the Day, To the North.)
One cannot help but see these concluding immolations as the "wo–
man's revenge," condign punishment for male weakness, hesitation
and disingenuousness. And
if
there is something chilling and merciless
in these finales, no one can doubt they give prodigal relief to both
feminine sentiment and womanly outrage.
Since Miss Bowen's purest talent is for the simple love story, she
seems to me at her best in
To the North,
a harsh, terrifying and un–
affected book. Even the title avoids the sentimental disguise of the
other novels and candidly indicates the zero temperature at which
these love affairs end") Emmeline, the heroine, has the charm of an ad–
mission; she is in t e flesh what you have felt the other heroines
really were, no matter what the author pretended. Fresh, competent
(a business of her own), myopic, always reaching for her glasses or
seeing the world through a pleasant, deceptive haze, exorbitantly in–
sensitive to the true character of her lover, unwilling to countenance
his frantic warnings, idealistic, cruel when disabused, she hounds
the fleeing man, and finally, when she can no longer avoid facing
the truth, gets him into a car and drives so fast they are both killed.
This book has the finished, clean and moving success the others
merely hope to achieve by considerable cant about taste and manners.
I cannot share E. SackviIle-West's statement in
Horizon
that
"Elizabeth Bowen is already assured of a superior place in any civ–
ilization capable of appreciating, say,
Middlemarch."
This critic
might have gone through the whole of
The Cambridge History
with–
out finding a comparison more unflattering to Miss Bowen. But I
wonder if these comparisons are meant to
be
taken seriously. They are
