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ARTISAN REVIEW
Many years have now passed since I first read this work of Elizabeth
Bowen's and on the earlier reading I seem wholly to have missed what
now strikes me as its most salient but least attractive feature, its author's
bald assumption of the natural superiority of her class. Nowhere does the
book challenge Bowen's right, conferred upon her by her own elevated
social location, to pass condescending and even dismissive judgment upon
those of her characters who happen to be less fortunately situated in the
world than herself. The book is undeniably gifted. Few novelists since
Dickens have matched Bowen's ability to capture atmosphere - I still
feel in my nostrils the wet salt air which blows in from the ocean at the
seaside resort where much of her narrative unfolds. And although her
Portia, the book's sixteen-year-old protagonist, is much too "fine" for
my taste or credence, Bowen's portrayal of the other adolescents in her
story is unerringly skillful.
Today, I find it highly unconvincing that Bowen's Eddie is in any
sense a portrait of the youthful Goronwy Rees. Bowen was a mature
woman, ten years his senior, when she knew Goronwy - he apparently
had a penchant for women older than himself
It
is unimaginable to me
that she would have taken an Eddie, so callow and small-minded, into
her home and life. While it may be that at twenty-three, Eddie's age in
the novel, Goronwy was in fact a seducer and even a scamp, we know
that he was also a developed intelligence, the winner of a First at
Oxford and of a highly-valued junior fellowship at All Souls. His
youthful distinction of mind is surely not to be confused with the cheap
cleverness of an Eddie. We may easily understand that Goronwy at
twenty-three would have been attracted to a mature distinguished
woman like Bowen, but it defies good sense to suppose that he would
have amused himself, as Eddie does, with the love of a child. Bowen's
Portia is not an intellectual prodigy, far from it, nor is she a sexual
prodigy, a Lolita. She is not presented to us by her author as at all a
perverse sexual preference of Eddie's. She is Bowen's notion of virtuous
girlhood.
Elizabeth Bowen was living in Oxford during our first year there
and we were often at the same Oxford functions . She was an imposing
presence in the University community.
It
was forbidden to smoke at
High Table in the Oxford colleges; Bowen alone violated this rule. No
one dared to intervene. I watched her light up between courses at dinner
at Magdalen; anxious but wordless, the Principal fetched her an ashtray. I
was myself then still a compulsive smoker and I envied Bowen her
boldness and wished that I could command the deference which she
could rely upon.
It
was difficult for me to associate someone of her
weightiness with the roguish boy lover, Eddie.
