Elizabeth Bowen's Last September.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a descendant of Henry Bowen, one of Cromwell's colonels in the Invasion of Ireland of 1649. She wrote about ten each of novels, volumes of short stories, and belles lettres of essays, memoirs, and travel writings. She was born in Dublin, lived from 1907 to 1952 in England, and was an outrider of the Bloomsbury Group, where she is associated most with Rose Macauley and Sean O Faolain. She is considered a novelist of the 30s, possibly her most well-regarded novel is The Death of the Heart (1939), although her widest fame is probably as the author of "The Demon Lover" (1945), a short story depicting the mental trauma of the London Blitz. The Last September (1929), her third novel, combines two of her signature themes.

It is set in County Cork in the year 1920, the height of the Irish War of Independence, at Danielstown, the ancestral home of the Naylors, landed members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In 1930 Elizabeth inherited the real Bowen's Court of County Cork, her family's property for over 250 years, and she retired there in 1952. Unable to make a go of it, the house was sold and rased (as the English say) in 1959. During the war years Bowen reported for the War Department on Ireland, and she published a memoir, Bowen's Court, in 1942.

The novel is also an example of her most central theme. Bowen's father suffered mental illness in 1907 and her mother passed away in 1912. Bowen was seen to by her aunts and sent to boarding school. She believed that the fundamental emotional experience of her life was the upper-class reserve that prohibited frank talk with a young Edwardian girl. Her novels are inhabited by wealthy but innocent young women who badly need guidance to navigate the complex and highly formal social world around them, but who receive none and must learn harsh lessons on their own.

The Last September depicts a world of tennis parties, long country-house visits, and young people's dances, and the incongruity would be even more obvious to an English or Irish reader of the 30s than it is to us today. Lois, orphaned ward of the Naylor's, is a self-conscious woman of nineteen or twenty. She and her few friends (she is used to a somewhat isolated life in the Irish countryside) are the romantic interests of the young English officers who are garrisoned in the town, searching poor homes for weapons and pursuing known guerrillas, while the Black and Tans make the countryside unsafe for anyone. The novel juxtaposes the detached mannerisms of the local gentry against the undercurrent of violence and threat.

The Anglo-Irish residents of Danielstown are lost in confusion as their Irish identity comes out from under them. For example,the Naylor household is nonplussed when a married house guest develops a crush on one of Lois's girlfriends. They are people who can only speak with an arch indirectness. In this most autobiographical of Bowen's novels Lois is a mixture of inchoate realization that she must make fateful decisions on her own and a deep girlish innocence about the romantic narrative of life.

Bowen is an ambitious stylist who generally makes good effects when she elevates her writing. She is not quite as modernist as many of her contemporaries but she does share the modernist penchant for internal monologue and oblique observation. I would say Henry James seems as big of an influence here as anyone.

Two other novels that depict the end of the Anglo-Irish world are the subjects of previous posts. One of the most famous is William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983), a very good book, but my personal favorite is J. G. Farrell's Troubles (1970). Neil Jordan's 1996 movie Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson, is an interesting (but violent) attempt to depict the period.

Farrell's Troubles

J. G. Farrell's Troubles (1970)is the first novel in his so-called "Empire Trilogy," followed by The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, Booker Prize winner) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Of course "Troubles" refers to the ongoing violence between Irish republicans and British security forces (the notorious "Black and Tans") in the early 20th century after the Easter Uprising of 1916 and during the subsequent Irish civil war, and then later between Protestant Unionists and the IRA in the middle decades of the century and sporadically until the present day.

Farrell, meanwhile, sees the fall of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the wider context of the general collapse of the British Empire starting with World War I. Troubles is written from the perspective of these Englishmen whose world is rapidly collapsing, the "native Irish" are here seemingly passive but unmistakably menacing townsfolk, mostly offstage. The central allegory, and a brilliant concept it is, is the Hotel Majestic, a Victorian-era grand hotel on the Irish Sea coast near Wexford, the southeastern coast of Ireland (that is, looking towards England). The hotel is huge and was once magnificent, the scene of generations of memories of the grand old days of Anglo dominance, and the abode of a coterie of elderly ladies who have been there so long that they are part of the legacy.

The building, however, is falling down around their heads, as Edward Spencer, the proprietor, hasn't been able to summon either the money or the will to maintain it for years. Algae-filled swimming pools, handball courts used as pig sties, long-empty rooms full of mouldering furniture, and mysterious recesses known only to malingering, half-mad servants and feral cats: the crumbling old pile is the star of the book. Not that the book isn't filled with excellent human characters, in fact there is a large eccentric cast of people, centered around Major Archer, a veteran of the trenches who wanders out to Ireland at loose ends and drops himself off of the earth by becoming Edward's best friend and installing himself at the Majestic, where he whiles away the weeks playing whist with the "old ladies," as they are invariably called.

Of course this is a world out of time, drifting towards the falls, and things are going to end badly. The genius of the book (and this is one of the best Irish novels I've read, and if you look over this blog you'll see that I've read quite a few) is that it is, page after page, hilarious. It's so funny that one laughs out loud again and again. This humor is what makes the book powerful. It brings out the essence of tragedy, that is that it's the simple foibles and limitations of human nature that slowly lead us into inevitable moments of violent upheaval. The imperial madness of the English, defiantly asserting their cultural prerogatives against the background of a subjugated but overwhelming local culture that is only dimly understood, is brilliantly rendered.

I've Amazoned up a copy of The Siege of Krishnapur and will put it in the Stack.