One can’t help making the unfavorable comparison between Elizabeth Bowen and Jane Austen. Both are clever, but Bowen so persistently that one is almost cloyed. Dazzled is the better word, and one wonders at length if the book ought to be read with sunglasses. Of course there can’t be too much cleverness, or better, too much intelligence in a work of literature, but there can be too much of a superstructure without a sense of ballast, too much of observation, apt simile and metaphor, clever handling of everything with the exception of an underlying substance. It would be wrong to call Bowen insubstantial, but there is the sense that all her cunning adornments are too much for what she really wants to say, that they are what she really wants to do.
Put that comparison aside and take up another. The characters of Bowen are interesting like Austen’s are, alive; but none of them are interesting for being good. They are odd, perverse, flighty and even witty, pathetic, predatory, abstracted, distant, nervous and always comical though discomposed and irremediable. The effect of having characters that are always comical is one of levity, and in the scheme of gravity of such a world you feel the void of intelligent people. It is disappointing that Bowen’s satire allows very little for the intelligence of her characters. Surely such an intelligent woman knew some intelligent people and might have imagined some good ones, some with sense and perhaps even virtue.
What does not disappoint? Bowen’s deft handling of interpersonal subtleties, the emotional tension of situations, the jousting of people’s expectations when they meet, the disparities of social situations, the maneuvering, the manipulating, the confusions, all that stuff. I mentioned to a friend who is a literature student and was unfamiliar with Bowen that she was strong on interpersonal subtleties and he recoiled from the book. Why? I think it is fascinating when well done: curious, delicate and intriguing. A very satisfying pleasure it is just to read one well done scene and grasp the change in the seasons of the spirit as persons meet, discourse, gesture, and part forever different. She does this repeatedly—on this the novel depends and lives—and it is very varied, very skillful.
Elizabeth Bowen also has the absolute measure of the mood of a description. She can be languid when it is necessary, she can conjure up an atmosphere with a long description and shatter it with a gesture, she can put it all into one word or few. She is very brisk in that there is nothing unnecessary, never the sense that she is taking too many words for what she needs to do. She may be, after a while, too clever, but she is never boring. Along with this are her similes. Her similes are enviable—and I mean that observation variously.
As to the point of writing the novel, it is subtle and I’m not sure I’m equal to it. In interpersonal relations there is a factor with a largish part: misunderstanding. Bowen explores this factor—in this case caused by conclusions people jump to in pursuit of interests toward which their personalities propel them. Misunderstandings are crucial for relationships and for life, and their consequences range from meaningless to fatal. It seems to have intrigued Bowen very much, this inclusion of randomness into interpersonal relationships: she who so much had catalogued, observed, understood and calculated, she whose intelligence played through all the complicated circuitry of human relationships. Misunderstanding—a result of our human limitation in one way or another—is what really undermines all prediction and ranges in its consequences to fascinating distances: the meaningless to the fatal, and here they’re brought by plausible circumstances to lie side by side.
(I have the sense there is more Bowen is saying and perhaps I am missing it, but I gave the thing a pretty close reading for she held my interest. If I have missed something, it may be the elusive ballast I talked about in the first paragraph, but I think the consequences and importance of misunderstandings is the substance, and good substance, but a bit beside the point of character even when you consider the why of these misunderstandings.)
The question about the title hangs over the novel till the last chapter, and then the enigma suddenly resolves. I do not think that Bowen maintains her deft control at this point; what she is trying to do is very difficult. She is bringing together the elements of her meaning and all through the novel she has been giving them a gradual tincture, something subtle in its shade and coloring. But when you do something gradual like that you do not expect a surge of chaos, you expect the flowering of something delicate. If something flowers, it does so too abruptly. The end is not implausible, not unlooked for, not unsatisfying, but I found it awkward to encounter a cliffhanger for all that the novel is fraught with a sense of doom throughout. The south is gregarious, the north is alone, and there is a misunderstanding that does not recognize this geography of the soul which lives like a mystery in the midst of society, vitiating, frustrating, and even dealing death.
An oddity: at least two characters think thoughts which are immediately followed by Bowen’s comment that said character did not know what they meant by that thought. One character thinks “Tragedy is disparity,” and then we are told he doesn’t know what he means. If it is a clue to the reader about something coming, that seems a really clumsy way to do it. It is not like Bowen to do something clumsily. Explanations of the phenomenon can be made—but satisfying ones?
The modern novel seems to have turned in obsession with the self. This is a novel from 1932 and already one detects people under whose skin there is not that much to hold the attention. Attention is not directed at the characters of the persons, but at the interplay of characters, as if the characters were pins in a literary pinball rather than the objects of interest themselves. Ah well, strange how much one can complain about in this novel and still enjoy it. It really is in many ways brilliant because there is much to admire here, though to me it points toward the greater satisfaction to be achieved in her short stories.
Unknowing 