Bowen's Christmas card

This passage from Bowen's short essay "The Light in the Dark" describes her ideal Christmas card, which to me is striking in its strange combination of nostalgia and forboding. Although its image of a woodman's cottage is wholly at odds with the Big House with which we associate her, Bowen's description nonetheless captures the same haunting loneliness that I associate with The Last September--despite its idealism and nostalgia, her picture nonetheless seems to see the cottage as a symbol of the isolation towards which that other, bigger world always moves.

I'm not entirely sure where this could be included--it's from a lovely gift edition of the essay--but if we do something about Christmas, or Anglo-Irish views of the "simple life," or simply something about the imagination, it could be useful.

• "Each of us, probably, has in mind one ideal and absolute of the Christmas card, as received in childhood. My own taste (date around 1910) is this—I behold a cottage gable in deep, dusky silhouette against an inspiring gleam of sunset, one window lit; smoke goes up from the chimney. To this, a woodman returning, footprint by footprint, across the foreground snow; all around stretch white wastes, the bare trees are dark. How it glows and glows through that one small window—core of the world, magnet to man, the home! Towards it, the coach lurches among the drifts, the cravatted rider whips up his horse, the red-mittened children drag their laden sledge, the spotted dog lollops, the cat leads her train of kittens, the crinolined lady picks her delicate way. All Christmas-card-land creatures have the same destination. My woodman’s cottage, crouched in smouldering evening, remains for me forever the symbol-scene—no better picture, before or since, has so fixed for me that light in the falling dark; or, by contrast, the elemental and daunting loneliness of Elsewhere. That sense of the Elsewhere, and of those straying in it, can but encircle Christmas, if one has any heart."
  

Elizabeth Bowen Goes to London

Elizabeth Bowen has a fantastic short essay in a 1957 collection called Coming to London (ed. John Lehman) in which she describes her impressions of London as an Anglo-Irish 4-yr-old. She then goes on to describe the way London evolved for her into the place where writers seem to come from. My favorite parts of the essay are at the beginning, but I've also included a lovely quote where Bowen talks about her memory being dominated by visual rather than aural impressions.

• All through my childhood, London had a fictitious existence for me. It loomed darkly somewhere at the other side of the water; I thought of it (when at all) as an entity, at once magnetic and dangerous. It was, from all I heard, a city into which no one ventured alone, and which was to be entered only after preparation and wary forethought. It stood for the adult, and so much so that there should be children in London seemed unimaginable—in fact that there should be people of any kind was only a secondary idea: I pictured the thing as a mass of building, a somehow impious extreme of bulk and height in whose interstices was fog. I first crossed the city when I first crossed the sea, when I was 4: it must have been winter, we arrived after dark and were driven as hurriedly as possible from Euston to some other terminus in a cab. The street lamps, seeming dimmer than Dublin’s, showed us to be in the continuous bottom of the chasm, among movement conveying a sense of trouble, and which one suspected rather than saw. My mother, for a minute put down a window, saying, as though in extenuation, “London has a smell of its own.” But this, like all else given off, was nonhuman (74)

• If I had been an American child instead of an Anglo-Irish one, it is possible that London, from being farther in the distance, would have been more clear-cut as an idea: I should have had some rational notion of it, instead of being infested by it imaginatively. As it was, it was like a hand too near my eyes. Nobody ever told me about London, or explained to me what it was—I was assumed, I suppose, to have been born knowing. This must have come from the Anglo-Irish ambivalence as to all things English, a blend of impatience and evasiveness, a reluctance to be pinned down to a relationship—one which, all the same, nobody could have conceived of a life without. So for what seems a long time London remained partly a not quite convincing fiction, partly a symbol of ambiguity, partly an overcast physical fact. (75)

• I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley; and I know there were others. I remember almost unearthly electric light broken on brocade-angular folds of one poet’s dress, and her benevolence (she was talking about something lost under a sofa) and the graven face and shining cavern eyes of the other. Of Aldous Huxley I was most nearly frightened, through no fault of his. But alas these images, and se many since, cast themselves on the screen as a silent film: I have a wonderful visual memory but a poor verbal one. I recall little or anything that has been at any time said—the sense and atmosphere of a conversation, yes, but the words, no. And all things considered, this is a tragedy. (79)

Bowen's Jingling Syntax

“When her editor questioned some of the contortions, Bowen replied: ‘I’d rather keep the jars, “jingles” and awkwardnesses – e.g. “seemed unseemly,” “felt to falter”.  They do to my mind express something.  In some cases I want the rhythm to jerk or jar – to an extent, even, which may displease the reader.’”  (from Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, 166, note 57: Letter to Daniel George, 2 June 1948, HRHRC)

Mss letter to Daniel George, in Princeton "Milberg Misc. Mss." file, 18.4.49:  “I wondered if I’d been a bit harsh of Angus Wilson, but I hate noisy “strong” writing, and also still more writing that’s a discharge of decaying matter from the system.  I felt A.W. was intelligent enough to merit a rap.  And that Sean O’F., who to my mind as a reviewer resembles an old nanny-goat teetering over a rock garden, just as much as he’s an eagle, at his best, in stories and novels, more than makes up to A.W. for my deficiencies.”

The relevant passages from The Heat of the Day:

à  Pg. 11:  “Lest this be too subtle, his tone was unkind enough to drive at least his will to unkindness home – it did: she withdrew from the pocket her other hand in order to, self-protectively, fold her arms.  She could be felt to falter behind the barricade; and the programme, let go of by her as though incriminated, fluttered to the ground.”  (passage at concert, goes on to musicians’ “black, seated bodies had fastened to them the faces and hands of ghosts”

à  Pg. 236:  But this evening for Louie had rung the knell of Harrison, man of mystery, as a subject…It seemed unseemly, even, that his companion should have claimed for him the prerogative of pain: Louie simultaneously felt he could never suffer and wished he might.”

A Hireling's Job

Elizabeth Bowen letter 15 Oct. 1965:  “I absolutely loathe cooking, and never do anything but grill sausages or scramble or boil eggs – for which, I think, there is no particular receipe?  I think, if I may say so, that this present obsession with cooking is rather awful:  I’m convinced that many people loathe it as much as I do, but haven’t got the nerve to say so.  It’s a hireling’s job, and if one is put to it (I mean, if one is having a party) one can usually find a hireling to do it for one:  otherwise, one eats out.”